Richard Thompson fish

By Douglas Main

We now know that microplastics and nano-plastics are everywhere. They are found in the most remote parts of the deep ocean, on Mount Everest, in rainwater, in the food we eat and air we breathe. They’re showing up in animals and human organs, including the brain.

Just 20 years ago, though, almost nobody knew anything about these now-ubiquitous contaminants. That began to change with a seminal 2004 paper published in the journal Science which found tiny particles of plastic on beaches and in offshore sediments throughout Great Britain.

The study’s lead author, Richard Thompson, a marine scientist at the University of Plymouth in the UK, described these microscopic bits for the first time in this study as “microplastics.”

That paper helped launch a whole field of research. Now, Thompson and colleagues have published a perspective in the same journal, Science, examining what we’ve learned over the past 20 years, and making a call for action. We now know enough about the problem to shift our focus toward researching how to solve it, rather than exclusively continuing to document its extent and harms, the paper concludes.

Potential solutions are more important than ever on the cusp of the final meeting of the United Nations global plastics treaty, whose goal is to create international, legally binding instrument to address the plastic pollution crisis.

The New Lede spoke with Thompson about the issue and the points outlined in the new paper.