Studies of Plastic in Food and Air Averaged Under Half Marks in a New Quality Review

A team at Wageningen University has scored 950 published studies of microplastics in air, food and beverages against 13 quality criteria. The average study scored 12 points out of a possible 26.

The paper, published open access Oct. 16, 2026, in Microplastics and Nanoplastics, concludes that most current studies have significant shortcomings for use in risk assessment, and that the food and air data in particular may not adequately represent actual human exposure. The authors offer the scored set as a way for policymakers to pick the most reliable studies for health evaluations.

The scores describe how the studies were done, not how much plastic anyone swallows or breathes. The authors say that exposure data is what decides whether a health risk can be estimated at all, and that the measurements published so far are often too different from one another to be compared.

Each criterion was worth up to two points. The highest-scoring studies reached 20. The weakest points were much the same across the literature: studies often lacked positive and negative controls, and many skipped blank correction, the check that separates real particles from plastic shed by labware and room air. Others sampled in ways that did not represent how people actually eat, drink and breathe.

The group used an AI model, Gemini 1.5-pro, to pull the details out of each paper, and then assigned the scores with Python scripts. Human assessors checked the model's work on a sample of 87 studies. Margherita Barchiesi, Albert A. Koelmans and colleagues at Wageningen's Aquatic Ecology and Water Quality Management Group call it the largest assessment of its kind so far and the first to cover air, food and beverages at once. They say the scoring builds on earlier screenings rather than replacing them.

The version online is the accepted manuscript, which will be replaced by the final edited text. The work was funded by the Netherlands Organization for Health Research and Development and by Health-Holland's Top Sector Life Sciences and Health.