is a senior science reporter covering energy and the environment with more than a decade of experience. She is also the host of Hell or High Water: When Disaster Hits Home , a podcast from Vox Media and Audible Originals.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
Thousands of delegates have descended upon Geneva this week for what’s supposed to be the culmination of years of negotiations that, if successful, are supposed to end in a groundbreaking global plastics treaty. They might be breathing in the very thing they’re trying to clean up as they negotiate.
Greenpeace tested the air around the city just before the talks began this month and found a small amount of microplastics. It wasn’t so much a rigorous study as it was a way to prove a point. Microplastics are turning up all over the place, including in the air we breathe.
That’s why health and environmental advocates, as well as a coalition of governments, are pushing for an ambitious plastics treaty in Geneva. Recycling isn’t enough — only limiting production can stem the tide of plastic pollution, they contend.
Recycling isn’t enough
“That you can find microplastics in urban air, that’s not really shocking because it’s been reported before in other cities. I think this is just a way of illustrating that nowhere is free from this pollution,” says David Santillo, a senior scientist with Greenpeace Research Laboratories.
Greenpeace strapped an air-monitoring device to a person while they went about their day in Geneva, spending about eight hours in and out of shops, cafes, office spaces, and a railway station. The samples they collected on July 17th were meant to show what a typical visitor to the city might be exposed to; they weren’t able to take any samples within the negotiation rooms that delegates would actually use.
The device had a replaceable silver filter that Greenpeace researchers were then able to analyze to see what particles they caught, which amounted to at least 165 fibers and fragments. The filters picked up a range of different materials like bits of skin, plant-based fibers, and what was likely soot. Greenpeace was interested in synthetic materials, however, and was ultimately able to identify 12 pieces of microplastics, including polyester, nylon, polyethylene used to make bottles and bags, and other types of plastics. That might not sound like much, but the organization only had the equipment to be able to detect larger particles that were at least 10 microns in size. (For comparison, the average human hair is about 70 microns in diameter.)
“If they found the big ones, it’s a pretty fair bet that the smaller ones were there, as well,” says Philip Landrigan, director of the Global Public Health and the Common Good Program at Boston College, who was not involved in the Greenpeace study.
... continue reading