![]() ![]() “I just think this illustrates that plastics recycling in its traditional form has some pretty serious problems,” says Enck. Scientists and anti-pollution groups agree that the ultimate solution isn’t relying on recycling or trying to pull trash out of the ocean, but massively cutting plastic production. “What it really highlights is that we just really need to consider the impacts of the solutions.” “I really don't want it to suggest to people that we shouldn't recycle, and to give it a completely negative reputation,” she says. This new research shows that while filters can’t stop all the microplastics from leaving a recycling facility, they at least help substantially. Still, researchers like Brown don’t think that we should abandon recycling. If recycling was actually effective in its current form, the industry wouldn’t have to keep producing exponentially more plastic-it’s now churning out a trillion pounds a year. The industry’s literal dirty secret is that mountains of plastic waste are being shipped to economically developing countries, where the stuff is often burned in open pits, poisoning surrounding communities and sending still more microplastics and chemicals into the atmosphere. And as plastic products have gotten more complex-multilayered pouches for baby food, for instance-they’ve gotten harder to recycle. A plastic bottle is easy enough to process, but you can only do that a few times before the material degrades too much to be recycled again. Recycling is also a game of diminishing returns. “I'm not sure we can technologically engineer our way out of that problem.” “The recycling centers are potentially making things worse by actually creating microplastics faster and discharging them into both water and air,” says Deonie Allen, a coauthor of the paper and a microplastics researcher at the University of Birmingham. It’s deconstructing it and putting it back together again. Recycling a plastic bottle, then, isn’t just turning it into a new bottle. When plastics break down in water, they release “leachate”-a complex cocktail of chemicals, many of which are hazardous to life. Plastic particles can be dangerous to human lung cells, and a previous study found that laborers who work with nylon, which is also made of plastic, suffer from a chronic disease known as flock worker’s lung. Previous research has found that recycled pellets contain a number of toxic chemicals, including endocrine-disrupting ones. These researchers also found high levels of airborne microplastics inside the facility, ready for workers to inhale. ![]() “If this is this bad, what are the others like?” “It is a state-of-the-art plant, so it doesn’t get any better,” he says. But because it was brand-new, it was probably a best-case scenario, says Steve Allen, a microplastics researcher at the Ocean Frontiers Institute and coauthor of the new paper. The full extent of the problem isn’t yet clear, as this pilot study observed just one facility. They're not always connected to the public sewer system.” That means the plastics could end up in the water people use for drinking or irrigating crops. But, says Enck, “some of these facilities might be discharging directly into groundwater. “But we easily could have found so many smaller than that.”ĭepending on the recycling facility, that wastewater might next flow to a sewer system and eventually to a treatment plant that is not equipped to filter out such small particles before pumping the water into the environment. “It completely shocked me just how tiny the majority of them were,” says Brown. In two of the sample points, approximately 95 percent of the microplastics were under 10 microns, and 85 percent were under 5 microns. And these researchers were finding a lot of particularly small particles. So this is likely a significant underestimate. Plastic particles can get way smaller-like nanoplastics that are tiny enough to enter individual cells-and they grow much more numerous as they do. But a critical caveat is that the team only tested for microplastics down to 1.6 microns. ![]()
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