According to a new study, humans can inhale more than 70,000 microplastic particles each day in an indoor environment – far more than previously thought. Worse still, most of them are small enough to penetrate deep into our lungs.
Plastic is one of the defining environmental issues of our time, clogging up everything from our waterways to our bloodstreams. Tiny particles of the stuff enter our bodies not just through what we eat and drink but through the very air we breathe.
In a new study, scientists from the Université de Toulouse in France quantified just how much plastic dust we may be inhaling every day. The team took 16 indoor air samples from their own apartments and cars, then analyzed them using a technique called Raman spectroscopy to measure the concentration of microplastics floating around in there.
And, it turns out, it’s a lot. The median concentration for apartment air samples were 528 microplastic particles per cubic meter, and a whopping 2,238 particles per cubic meter in cars. Of those particles, 94 percent were less than 10 micrometers wide, which is small enough to work their way deep into lung tissue when inhaled.
