What Do We Actually Know About the Microplastics Inside Us? - Yale E360

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Microplastic particles.<br>Peter Dazeley / Getty Images

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.”"><br>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?<br>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.<br>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.<br>“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.”

Cassandra Rauert.<br>Courtesy of Cassandra Rauert

Yale Environment 360: Why is it so hard to study microplastics in the human body?<br>Cassandra Rauert: It’s quite a new field. And we’re trying to use analytical techniques that were developed for other purposes.<br>A few years ago, when we first started thinking about human exposure to plastics, we were like, “Oh, we should test some blood and just see what’s in there.” I tested a little bit of my blood and saw screamingly high levels of polyethylene. It just didn’t make sense. When I think about my diet, I’m not eating a lot of plastic-packaged foods. So that’s when we first started to think, “Okay, is there something else going on here with the analysis that we haven’t considered before?”<br>We assessed how reliable current measures are for trying to find microplastics in blood. And what we found is that lipids and fats will give you a false positive for polyethylene. Lipids are made up of the same building blocks as polyethylene, so when we analyze them, they look identical in our analysis instrument. This means that we can mistake a signal from a lipid for polyethylene if we don’t look at the data carefully.

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e360: In a paper you published last year you found that 18 previous studies on microplastics in human blood had this issue.<br>Rauert: We were putting [the study] out there to...