Post

Microplastic particles. Peter Dazeley / Getty Images

Pervasive plastic contamination and unreliable methods have clouded the science on microplastics in the human body. In an interview, Australian scientist Cassandra Rauert, who built a plastics-free lab to study human exposure, explores the challenges for researchers.

Scientists have been documenting the presence of microplastics in our oceans and soils, in air, drinking water, and food for more than a decade. More recently, peer-reviewed studies have revealed the presence of microplastics in the human body. But how much plastic do we consume, where is it coming from, and what is it doing to us?

Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland, in Australia, conducts research to better understand the impacts of such exposures. Her work has shown that the current analytical techniques used for detecting plastic in human blood are vulnerable to contamination from the lab environment. And last year, she published an attention-grabbing paper that found lipids present in blood can give false positives for the most commonly produced plastic, polyethylene. All of which suggests that some reported levels of microplastics in humans may be overestimated.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360 , Rauert describes how, after learning about the potential for microplastics to infiltrate a lab — whether from construction materials, equipment, clothing, or the air — she and her fellow researchers painstakingly rebuilt their workspace, using glass and steel, to drastically reduce the odds of contamination. The hope is that once researchers can accurately measure levels of microplastics in human tissue and blood, they’ll be able to determine what exactly plastic pollution is doing to us.

“I don’t think we’ve got really good evidence at all for what effects [microplastics] might be having,” Rauert says. And the much-hyped finding that we eat a credit card’s worth of plastic each week? “That has absolutely been debunked.”