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Two ocean eddies south of the Canary Islands held up to three times more microplastic in their upper 200 meters than the surrounding region, according to shipboard sampling published Sept. 3 in…
We tend to picture plastic pollution as something that happens to the ocean: bottles on beaches, a gyre of debris in the Pacific. But some of it is going the other way, into the ground under our…
Health Canada researchers dosed male and female mice with polystyrene nano- and microplastic particles for 28 days and found inflammation in the gallbladders of nine of 23 exposed males and two of 24…
Polyethylene microplastic buried in agricultural soil for 22 months lost 0.12% of its carbon to microbial breakdown, according to a paper published Sept. 1 in the journal Microplastics and…
A team led by Zoie T. Diana of the University of Toronto has released a reference library of infrared spectra for telling paint particles apart from other microplastics, and reports it worked far…
Plastic netting buried in a New Zealand tidal flat changed how the sediment responded to a storm, according to a two-month field experiment published Aug. 28, 2026, in Scientific Reports. Ines Bartl,…
Imagine a field that has been tested. Someone takes soil cores, measures the microplastic in them, compares the result against the concentration at which harm is expected, and finds the field is…
A tray of particles sits under an infrared microscope. Each one has been picked out of seawater, or a sediment core, or the gut of a fish, and each one has to be interrogated separately: a spectrum…
Fragments of PVC, nylon, and PET ground down to environmental sizes increased the death rate of human neutrophils in cell culture, and different plastics pushed the cells toward different ways of…
Pull a litre of seawater from beneath the ice north of Svalbard and hold it up to the light. It looks like the cleanest water anywhere on the planet, and by most measures it is. What it also carries,…