The Science of Microplastics was Just Completely Upended
- Apr 10
- 8 min read
There’s been a pretty gnarly turn of events in the whole microplastics saga. And to illustrate how much of a potential 180 this could be, I want to just briefly mention one of my favorite stories from the field of astronomy which this whole thing reminds me of very much.
In 1998, the Australian Parkes Radio Telescope picked up a series of fast radio bursts, or FRBs for short. The signals they found were new and unique and mysterious, and the team named them perytons. This was a moment when SETI was a major force, the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. It was a big craze. You had screensavers you could download that would analyze signals in a cool crowdsourced science campaign that helped with the search for aliens, and would check out these interesting signals while your machine was idle. And these perytons were very interesting signals. They had all the hallmark signs of messages sent from an intelligent species and it was very exciting. Fortunately the Parkes laboratory was just equipped with a device that filtered out and identified signals that were not coming from space, and this eventually led them to discover the true origin of the signals they found. This and the fact that the vast majority of these signals were coming to them around the hours of lunch time. The researchers looked at every possible frequency they could think of and finally matched up the signals to known phenomena, and discovered soon after that what they thought were mysterious deep space messages with possible intelligent design was actually just all coming from the microwave in the break room. Specifically the signal was coming from the microwave radiation that escaped from the microwave when someone opened the door before it was done cooking, and in that fraction of a second the signal would leak out. Not aliens, just Herb heating up his chicken salad again. And it took 17 years to solve this because it wasn’t finally figured out until 2015. It wasn’t like they just went next door and were like, “oooohhhh, uh, yeah, it’s the microwave.” Someone may have spent their whole career figuring this out.
Microplastics may go down in history right next to the story of the Parkes Radio Telescope. I’ll be honest, I was buying the hype. I was really here for it. For a minute there I was very much behind the idea that microplastics were going to turn out to be the thing that took down our modern society, they were going to be the lead pipes of the Roman Empire, they were going to send us into a new apocalyptic stone age. We were picking up microplastics from all corners of the Earth, in our most remote areas that we never even visited or couldn’t access, and even finding them inside of ourselves. In our brains, in our balls—that’s a true story, I did a video on it. But yeah, fortunately, there’s a big new reason why we might be totally in the clear now. And that’s because a lot of microplastics we’re picking up from the craziest parts of our environment, like the antarctic ice core samples from prehistoric ages, etc., well scientists might just be finding microplastics inside them that are coming from their own gloves that they’re wearing to examine them.
Before we go over the details and assemble this new puzzle as if out of legos, do please make sure to like the video and subscribe to the channel, so you can learn along with me about the state of the world and the tech, science, and society that make it up, with you right in the middle of it all.
A new paper from researchers at the University of Michigan details the problem. They were actually running an experiment to measure the amount of microplastics in the atmosphere when they got a bit derailed. Several teams across the departments of chemistry, statistics, and climate and space sciences engineering were all sifting through the air above the state of Michigan to get on the microplastics craze and see how many of these things are just floating around. They did this in a similar way to how people in little house on the prairie times would collect wild yeast from the air. Which I learned about during my bread-making phase that I only got to after everyone else stopped, and collecting wild yeast from the air is one of those human endeavors that just immediately hits you as like a “how the f*ck did anyone figure this out?” Like some of the foods we make that are actually poisonous during part of the process. Like who stopped during that step and died and everyone else was like, “yeah, just needs a little more time in the barrel”?? Hansel and many of our friends died to give us this delicious rhubarb pie (rhubarb leaves are poisonous).
But the results the team got back were immediately suspicious to at least the lead researcher, because they were thousands of times higher than what they expected to find. And instead of just accepting the results and publishing research about insane levels of microplastics in the atmosphere, they put in their due diligence and went about looking for something that could have skewed the results. And they literally found that thing in their own two hands. The kind of gloves they were using for the initial experiment were nitrile gloves, a common synthetic lab glove. The team soon discovered that the stearate coating from their gloves gives off particles that look exactly like microplastics. Stearates are a saturated fatty acid from animal fats with many uses, but one of them is to make lubricants like the coating on lab gloves that keep them from sticking to the manufacturing molds that make them and also to each other.
This is where the Michigan research took a pretty major turn, because they realized that if this was happening to them, then it must be happening to everyone else looking into the prevalence of microplastics in the world. From here, they designed an experiment that examined seven different types of gloves used in labs and how much of their leakage was really to blame for some of the microplastic findings in recent years. They discovered that, on average, lab gloves led to 2,000 false positives per square millimeter of area. So that’s kind of a lot. Anytime that researchers are touching samples or equipment that’s going to hold samples with gloved hands, there’s a potential contamination risk. The Michigan team set up conditions to mimic just regularly laboratory procedures and handling samples the way you would if you were going about an experiment. So it’s extremely likely that our conclusions about the prevalence of microplastics being absolutely everywhere are maybe a bit skewed.
Things that this doesn’t mean though: It doesn’t mean that microplastics are not a problem. Sorry, that was a lot of negatives. Microplastics are still a problem. They’re not the end of the Roman Empire, for us, though. As the social media trend pointed out, as a man, I think about the Roman Empire at least once a day. Where’s my SPQR? Here is it. There you go. Lead poisoning wasn’t the sole cause of the fall of the Roman Empire, but it’s theorized to have been a major factor. And not just because the plumbing was made of lead. The word plumbing itself comes from the Latin for lead, plumbum, or plumbarias, a lead worker, or plumber. No kids, sadly the lead in those days was airborne due to extensive metal mining operations. A 2025 study found that during the peak of the Empire, the amount of atmospheric lead pollution was lowering IQs by 2.5 to 3 percentage points. When’s the Idiocracy prequel coming? Idiocracy: Across the Rubicon.
Plastics and their numerous chemical configurations do cause a lot of issues that we know about, and they’re in everything. Everything is made of plastic. And pieces of that plastic do get into many places they shouldn’t in a large volume. In the words of the lead researcher from the Michigan study, “As microplastic researchers looking for microplastics in the environment, we’re searching for the needle in the haystack, but there really shouldn’t be a needle to begin with.”
There’s a new study being reported on right now that one particular chemical in plastic that’s designed to make devices more flexible has contributed to 74,000 newborn deaths and just under two million preterm births in just one year in 2018, which was 8% of all preterm births in that year. And the study authors point out that simply replacing this one chemical is unlikely to do anything at all, because manufacturers will substitute another one that’s just as likely to contribute to terrible health outcomes. There are endless plastic compounds out there that are ready to be thrown into the mix and we won’t have time to study their effects on the human body before they’re just in everything we touch. It’s a really tough race against developing the infrastructure that we all admittedly need and that makes life better in a great many ways, but that there are definitely also some drawbacks to having everywhere. I feel like there needs to be a big coordinated effort that comes from the government in order to categorize and regulate these things, but the unchecked lassez faire pro-oligarchy peeps love to tell me that big government is going to lead to terrible situations where we have plastic compounds that kill our children and, no wait, that’s what’s happening right now with the trusting companies and billionaires thing instead. Huh.
Okay, so the Michigan team’s data does give us great recommendations for moving forward that should solve the problem of contamination, and that’s great. They found that a certain type of glove, clean room gloves, are the best kind to wear when looking for microplastics because they don’t have stearate coatings and don’t give off the false positives. They’ve also identified the problem, which some people will probably scoff at, but that’s not small thing. It means that we know there’s been a major issue in this area of research and now we can eliminate it altogether and get better science. One way to do that is to recruit more chemistry into the process. Because learning how to better identify stearates in samples, which are now pretty much identical through laboratory observation, that would make it so one could wear whatever gloves they wanted and we could get filtered results that were 100% accurate.
I think too many people look at this kind of stuff as a bad thing, like a really bad thing. Sort of like a “ha! The scientists got this one wrong!” I don’t know why, but there’s a real tendency to jump to a gotcha type of thing. And for me, there might be some mixed feelings in there, but overall this is very, very good. Advancing our understanding of any aspect of the world is always a good thing, even if it comes at the expense of our own egos or what we thought that we knew. This is the kind of skill of changing minds that we desperately need to cultivate. Where we just learn to relax and follow the evidence.
My personal mixed feelings come in the area of doomerism. I almost feel a little disappointed that the threat of microplastics probably isn’t really that big of a deal. One thing that brings up for me is that I can still get caught up in media hype. Because the headlines about microplastics were just everywhere since we learned about how tiny plastics were everywhere, and media coverage has always been extremely alarmist about it. But the news is always either alarmist or unrealistically hopeful, there’s hardly an in-between. If you’re interested in my examination into why that is, and what emotions in particular make people click or view content online, and how that can be manipulated by news and content outlets, I’ve done a number of related videos about that. Like this most recent one about the phenomenon of collective narcissism and why I think most of us never really left high school.
But yeah, turns out that we’re all probably too riled up about microplastics. There are very likely less of them than we previously thought, and they probably aren’t turning us into big plastic tupperware people. Except that’s definitely exactly what I would say if I was a big plastic tupperware person. I can disassemble and reassemble myself into various configurations now, and when I give someone a hug these days, I seal them in for freshness. I don’t know, you decide. See you next time.
Sources:
Comments