Mini-microplastics are everywhere, our clothing is a major culprit. Polyester products such as yoga pants and sports clothing release millions of microfibers every time we do laundry. Microplastics are defined as pieces of plastic measuring smaller than 5 millimeters in length.
As The Story of Stuff explains in its video:
synthetic fabrics, from which 60% of all clothing on earth is made, have a big hidden problem: when they’re washed, they release tiny plastic bits — called microfibers — that flow down our drains, through water treatment plants, and out into our rivers, lakes and oceans by the billions.
New research has been published in Limnology and Oceanography Letters, the study was led by Jennifer Brandon from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, here are their findings. For every 1,000 liters of ocean water or 264 gallons tested, they found 8.3 million pieces of ‘mini-microplastic!’ For the sake of comparison, they estimate that since a kiddie pool can hold around 163 gallons of water, a children’s pool could contain around 5.1 million pieces of microplastic.
This number is five to seven times greater than what scientists had previously estimated! The research team explained why the numbers are so much different than they had originally thought them to be.
“For years we’ve been doing microplastics studies the same way (by) using a net to collect samples, but anything smaller than that net mesh has been escaping,” said Brandon.
Independent research from 1971 to 2013 had all been done with the same kind of net, they were only able to capture plastics larger than 1/3 of a millimeter in size or 333 micrometers. Those nets were too big to capture the smallest particles known as mini-microplastics. Brandon had arrived at a terrifying realization:
“I saw these published size ranges and thought, we are under-sampling this smaller range. There’s a big knowledge gap”
She and her team developed a new way of measuring and detecting the mini-microplastics in seawater. They thought about testing the stomachs of tiny invertebrates known as salps. These salps are filter-feeding invertebrates that pump water through their bodies, the team reasoned perhaps microplastics would accumulate in the salps’ stomachs.
The Scripps team collected samples from both the deep swimming salp and the surface water of the pacific. They used a special fluorescent microscope to illuminate microplastics, pointing out that “plastic self-illuminates when exposed to multiple wavelengths of light.” By using this method they were able to document pieces thinner than the width of a human hair at 10 micrometers and they tested seawater from 2009-2017.
Brandon, on the findings, said:
The thing that truly surprised me the most was that every salp, regardless of year collected, species, life stage, or part of the ocean collected, had plastic in its stomach. A species having 100% ingestion rates is quite extraordinary, and devastating for the food web that eats salps.
The normal digestion time for a salp is between 2 to 7 hours, so the team had expected the stomachs to be near empty. Using these samples allowed them to calculate a concentration of 8.3 million mini-microplastics per 1,000 liters of ocean water.
“The quantity is one million times more numerically, but when you multiply the quantity times volume, the volume of the larger pieces is still much higher,” said Brandon. This distinction matters, she said, depending on what kind of animal you are. Smaller creatures like salps and small plankton will tend to eat more of the tiny bits of plastic while larger plankton and small fish are more likely to be impacted by larger pieces of plastic.
No one knows just how this affects humans, but it certainly impacts marine life. If the microplastics are not eaten they give off harmful chemicals and pollutants. To make matters worse, these chemicals and microplastics do not go away, instead, they break down into smaller and smaller pieces. The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) says we should be concerned, but claim it’s not known if people can be exposed to these pollutants by eating contaminated seafood.
I think even people with the smallest bit of common sense can figure out that eating plastic containing chemicals probably is not good for health. Marine life washing ashore with stomachs full of plastic is a grave indication of how prolific this issue has become. We can all become more conscious on an individual level to try and make a difference, from the clothes we buy to the amount of plastic we use.
