Researchers continue to grapple with the reality of tiny plastic shards — everywhere.
Concerns about microplastics are not new. They’ve been growing for more than a decade. Over the past two years, however, many creative solutions have emerged to address the problem on a local level, ranging from hoovering beaches to shooting bubbles up from river bottoms.
A 2019 study in Environmental Science & Technology estimated humans ingest up to 100,000 bits of plastic each day. It’s not just the physical presence of plastic inside the body that poses a potential problem; plastic’s chemical additives might affect different species’ tissues and organs, according to a 2021 study in Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry. However, there is disagreement in the literature as to how much microplastics harm species, including humans.
This wide range of measures could help in specific pollution hotspots, says Zoie Diana, a Duke doctoral candidate, who worked on the inventory and added 40 new inventions this year. But “if you have a technology that would capture microplastics at the industrial wastewater scale, before they enter our waterways, that would be ideal,” Diana says.
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