Plastic rain is now falling across the US
Here’s something else to worry about: plastic rain. Delivered like dust by the wind and rain, researchers in a new study estimate that more than 1,000 tons of tiny plastic microparticles – roughly the equivalent of 120-300 million plastic water bottles – falls upon national parks and protected wilderness areas in the western United States each year.
The findings were published Thursday in the peerreviewed journal Science.
Lead researcher Janice Brahney of Utah State University was “shocked” at the amount of microplastic her team uncovered, she said in a statement.
“Plastics don’t decompose,” she told the Denver Post. “They just break down into smaller and smaller fibers, and that allows them to be transported through the atmosphere, repeatedly being carried through the atmosphere.”
Overall, the world produced 348 million metric tons of plastic in 2017 and global production shows no sign of slowing down. In the United States, the per capita production of plastic waste is about 12 ounces per day.
High resilience and longevity make plastics particularly useful in everyday life, but these same properties lead to progressive fragmentation instead of degradation in the environment. These “microplastics” are known to accumulate in wastewaters, rivers, and ultimately the worlds’ oceans – and as Brahney’s team showed, they also accumulate in the atmosphere.
The pollution, obviously, isn’t limited to protected areas: Although her team only examined plastics in National Parks in the western U.S., “it would make sense that plastic pollution is falling everywhere and probably at higher rates in urban areas,” she told USA TODAY. “Our study was a bit of an accident as we meant to study phosphorus deposition in remote locations. Otherwise, we would have set up sites in cities!”
“If we took our mean deposition rate and extrapolated it out for the whole country, it would be 22,000 tons. We definitely need more research of these numbers,” Brahney said.