‘We can’t carry on’: the godfather of microplastics on how to stop them

In September 1993, during a beach clean on the Isle of Man, Richard Thompson noticed thousands of multicoloured fragments at his feet, looking like sand. While his colleagues filled sacks with crisp packets, fishing rope, plastic bags and bottles, Thompson became transfixed by the particles.

They were so tiny that they did not fit any category in the spreadsheet where volunteers recorded their findings. “Yet it was pretty clear to me that the most abundant item on the beach was the smallest stuff,” Thompson says.

Over the next 10 years, after completing a PhD and going on to teach marine biology at Newcastle, Southampton and Plymouth universities, Prof Thompson spent his spare time beach-hopping, often enlisting students to help him gather dozens of sand samples in tinfoil trays.

Back in the lab, they would confirm what Thompson had first suspected: the particles were all pieces of plastic, no larger than grains of sand, and ubiquitous along the UK coastline. It was pollution on a whole new scale.

“I started studying marine biology because it was going to be all about turtles, dolphins, and coral reefs,” he says. Instead, those minuscule particles became his main fascination.

In a short study in 2004, coauthored with Prof Andrea Russell at Southampton University, Thompson first described the particles as “microplastics”. He hypothesised that as plastic entered the sea, it slowly fragmented into small but persistent pieces that spread even farther afield. He did not expect much reaction from his modest one-page article.

“It had been a May bank holiday weekend, and we’d been away camping. I came back in and every email that morning was from a journalist, and the phone was ringing continuously.”

The story was picked up instantly by networks in the UK, Europe and Asia. “Shortly after it was published, it was being discussed in the Canadian parliament,” says Russell, whose experiments had confirmed that the particles were plastic.

The discovery helped spawn an entire field of microplastics research, and would be instrumental in plastic bag taxes and bans on plastic microbeads in rinse-off cosmetics in coun