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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