How long have we heard that microplastics are everywhere and probably responsible for all kinds of physical ills?
Even RFK Jr. and Trump's EPA are hitting the microplastics hard, to the tune of $144 million in research grants over the next five years.
However, some scientists at the University of Michigan may have just thrown a big wrinkle into that particular money machine.
It turns out that the nitrile and latex gloves scientists wear while doing microplastic research are coated in a substance called stearate salts, which are for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from microplastics.
Madeleine Clough and Anne McNeil performed an experiment to see how many microplastics were in the air and were surprised to find so many particles.
The researchers used air samplers which are fitted with a metal substrate. Air passes through the sampler, and particles from the atmosphere deposit onto the substrate. Then, using light-based spectroscopy, the researchers are able to determine what kind of particles are found on the substrate.
Clough prepared the substrates while wearing nitrile gloves, which is recommended by the guidance of literature in the microplastics field. But when she examined the substrates to estimate how many microplastics she captured, the results were many thousands of times greater than what she expected to find.
As it turns out, these particles weren't microplastics at all.
They checked everything to find out where the "microplastics" had come from and figured out it was their own gloves, to the tune of 2,000 false positives per square millimeter.
That's a lot of non-existent microplastics!!
They tried various means to sort the microplastics from the stearate salts to little avail.
The researchers designed another experiment to determine whether they were able to distinguish what a true microplastic looked like versus one of the stearate salts from the gloves. Using scanning electron microscopy as well as light-based microscopy, they found that the stearate was visually impossible to distinguish from polyethylene, the plastic it resembles.
Eduardo Ochoa Rivera and U-M professor of statistics Ambuj Tewari did come up with one possible way to differentiate between real microplastics and the glove contaminants, but it still means that every microplastic dataset out there needs to be revisited and tested for false positives.
But researchers shouldn't give up hope on all that sweet government, microplastic money just yet.
'We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none. There's still a lot out there, and that's the problem,' said McNeil.
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,' said Clough.
Sadly, this study did not answer the most important question of them all:
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