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A floating “island” in the Pacific Ocean twice the size of Texas, the conglomerate of plastic trash known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch bobs in the breeze, filled with straws that can lodge in the noses of turtles and six-pack rings and bottle caps that can strangle and choke sea creatures. It conjures a compelling visual—even if it falsely implies that the plastic-waste issue is contained, harming only the animals unlucky enough to brush up against the mass.
But what recent research suggests is that such easily visible garbage is “just the very tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the world’s plastic problem, says Matt Simon, science reporter at Wired and author of A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies. Beneath the surface, both literally and figuratively, is a massive number (in the trillions) of tiny microplastics and even tinier nanoplastics that are “accessible to the entire tree of life,” he says.
Occurring in a variety of shapes and colors, these mini plastics are unified by their size. Scientists refer to any plastics smaller than five millimeters (about the size of a sesame seed) as microplastics and have recently differentiated the very smallest of these pieces, smaller than 100 nanometers, as nanoplastics, which are not visible to the naked eye. The particular trouble that these tiny plastics pose is two-fold: It’s very tough to clean them up, and it’s very easy for them to pollute our ecosystems, as they can be either ingested or inhaled, or both, by all living things.