Microplastics in water aren’t inert and make damaging chemicals on their own

Its effect on people remains an ongoing question.

The short version

• One reason plastics are used so often is that they’re chemically inert, meaning bags, food containers, and cups don’t react with what we put in them.
• Yet they can still break down into microplastics, which turn up in drinking water, human blood, arteries, and brains.
• The consequences of that are uncertain.

What happened

“Whether microplastics can directly cause human disease is still being researched,” said Wei Min, a chemist at Columbia University. In a new Nature study, Min’s team took a step toward answering this question by demonstrating that microplastics are likely not as chemically inert as we might expect.

Why it matters

Min’s lab has spent years working on microdroplet chemistry, studying how water broken into tiny droplets behaves at its boundary with air.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.