Fast Company: “By some estimates, people have discarded 4,900 million tonnes of plastic have into the environment. Once in nature, that plastic starts to degrade, fragmenting into microplastics about the size of a sesame seed, which are inadvertently ingested by humans and animals through eating them in seafood and drinking them in water. Some reports suggest that we all consume five grams a week–about the weight of a bottle cap. But, we may be taking more plastics into our systems through our respiratory systems. There’s been less investigation of nanoplastics: particles smaller than microplastics, so small that they can move huge distances in the air and be more easily inhaled into the bloodstream. A new study looks at the travel of those lighter particles, finding them abundant in the atmosphere, and carried, via aerosol transmission, even to remote areas. As far as the scientists know, it’s “the most accurate record of air pollution by nanoplastics ever made.” These nanoplastics—smaller than 200 nanometers in size—are microplastics that have broken down even more over time, as well as tiny particles that our everyday plastics, like clothing, shed into the atmosphere. At that microscopic size, the plastics become airborne. “They are so small that they can be transported like normal aerosols in the air,” says Dominik Brunner, a researcher at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and an expert on atmospheric transport modeling…”