Microplastics – News and Features

Nanoscale particles of the most commonly used plastics tend to move through the water supply, especially in fresh water, or settle out in wastewater treatment plants, where they end up as sludge, in landfills, and often as fertilizer.

Current efforts to resolve the plastics crisis are ineffective and misleading. Policymakers and industry must address conflicts in the whole system, from production to end-of-life, warns a recent report.

With natural reserves of phosphate, an important component of fertilizer, running out, researchers are working on extracting phosphate from sewage sludge to reuse in fertilizers and other applications.

Whilst many studies have focused on terrestrial sources of microplastics, researchers have linked microplastics in China’s Beibu Gulf with heavy fishing activities.

Scientists have repurposed living cells into millimeter-wide "xenobots" that can move toward a target, potentially pick up a payload and heal themselves after being cut.

Researchers have demonstrated the transfer of microplastics through the food chain between microscopic prey and larval fish that live in coastal ecosystems.

Researchers have carried out the first study of microplastics in the atmosphere in London to determine what people within the city might be exposed to and where this comes from.

Nothing seems safe from plastic contamination. It is pulled from the nostrils of sea turtles, found in Antarctic waters and buried in the fossil record. But a new study suggests there could be a million times more pieces of plastic in the ocean than previously estimated.

Scientists have found that some corals are more likely to eat microplastics when they are consuming other food, yet microplastics alone are undesirable.

For the colorful, graceful sea fans swaying among the coral reefs in the waters around Puerto Rico, the metal copper is an emerging threat in an era of warming oceans.