‘They’re everywhere’: microplastics in oceans, air and human body

PARIS: From ocean depths to mountain peaks, humans have littered the planet with tiny shards of plastic. We have even absorbed these microplastics into our bodies -- with uncertain implications.

Images of plastic pollution have become familiar: a turtle suffocated by a shopping bag, water bottles washed up on beaches, or the monstrous "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" of floating detritus.

Millions of tonnes of plastic produced every year, largely from fossil fuels, make their way into the environment and degrade into smaller and smaller pieces. "We did not imagine 10 years ago that there could be so many small microplastics, invisible to the naked eye, and that they were everywhere around us," said Jean-Francois Ghiglione, a researcher at the Laboratory of Microbial Oceanography in France.

"And we could not yet envisage finding them in the human body". Now scientific studies are increasingly detecting microplastics in some human organs -- including "the lungs, spleen, kidneys, and even the placenta," Ghiglione told AFP.

It may not come as much of a shock that we breathe in these particles present in the air, in particular microfibres from synthetic clothing. "We know that there’s microplastics in the air, we know it’s all around us," said Laura Sadofsky, from the Hull York Medical School in the UK.

Her team found polypropylene and PET (polyethylene terephthalate) in lung tissue, identifying fibres from synthetic fabrics. "The surprise for us was how deep it got into the lungs and the size of those particles," she told AFP.

In March, another study reported the first traces of PET found in the blood. Given the small sample of volunteers, some scientists say it is too early to draw conclusions, but there are concerns that if plastics are in the bloodstream they could be transported to all organs. In 2021, researchers found microplastics in both maternal and foetal placental tissue, expressing "great concern" over the possible consequences on the development of the foetus.