美国国家公共电台 NPR Microplastic Found Even In The Air In France's Pyrenees Mountains

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

The mountain air over the Pyrenees of France should be about as pure as air can be, yet there's pollution even there. The air carries tiny plastic particles that have traveled with the wind, possibly from hundreds of miles away. Scientists who made this discovery suspect that microplastic could be floating everywhere. NPR's Christopher Joyce reports.

CHRISTOPHER JOYCE, BYLINE¹: As plastic degrades, it doesn't just disappear. It breaks into tiny pieces. It ends up in the dust in our homes and in rivers and lakes and oceans. Steve Allen at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland wondered if it also goes up into the sky.

STEVE ALLEN: I don't know if you've ever seen a plastic bag on a fence flapping away until it disappears. We thought that maybe it didn't just disappear, and we started to look for it a bit higher up.

JOYCE: Four and a half thousand feet up a mountain in a remote part of the French Pyrenees, in fact. Allen's team set up collectors there for five months to trap plastic particles as they fell to earth.

S ALLEN: We expected to find some. We didn't expect to find quite as much as we did.

JOYCE: Three hundred and sixty five plastic particles fell on a square meter collector every day. Allen was surprised by that.

S ALLEN: We kind of expected it to be in a city getting blown around, but way out there just was - the numbers was astounding².

JOYCE: Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers found several types of microplastic floating on the wind, fibers³ from clothing and bits from plastic bags, plastic film and packaging material. But they don't know where the particles come from geographically⁴.

DEONIE ALLEN: We know basically nothing about how they move.

JOYCE: Allen's wife and co-researcher Deonie Allen, who works at a French research institution called EcoLab, says scientists do know how dust gets blown, say from the Sahara across the Atlantic. But very few people have studied windblown plastic yet.

D ALLEN: We don't have this sort of material in nature.

JOYCE: Apparently⁵ the plastic isn't local. Only a few small villages lie within the nearest 60 miles of the collection site. Yet the density⁶ of the microplastics collected in the mountains is comparable to that found over the megacities of Paris and Dongguan in China, where similar studies have been done. Deonie Allen says if this much microplastic manages to get halfway⁷ up the Pyrenees mountains, it could theoretically be everywhere.

D ALLEN: We also don't know what they do to humans. We don't know how they form inside soils and how they move. They're a brand new pollution, but there's so much of it. And it's increasing so fast that it's something we really need to start learning about.

JOYCE: Christopher Joyce, NPR News.