Category: Microplastics

Plastics are inescapable. They are used in packaging, home supplies, medical devices, and countless other items. Naturally then, over the past several years, and as covered by ELM and GS’s Toxic Tort and Environmental Law team, microplastics have gained notoriety in the United States. These small fragments of plastic, smaller five millimeters, have increasingly been released into the environment — often into bodies of water — via production, use, or degradation. Microplastics have also been found in aquatic life and human organs.

Reflecting …

By Joshua Fine, Manager, Environmental Claims, Crum & Forster and George Buermann, Partner, Goldberg Segalla LLP

Seventy-nine percent of plastic waste ends up in landfills or the environment, much of which eventually ends up in our oceans. A March 8, 2023 study, estimated the average amount of small plastics in the ocean surface layer using available data on floating ocean plastics from 1979 through 2019 at 171 trillion plastic particles, mostly microplastics, weighing at about 2.5 million tons. Nurdles are “microplastic resin pellets” generally under …

Microplastics have been detected in human lungs and placentas, stool and blood, and the latest finding: heart tissue. In a pilot study published in Environmental Science & Technology, researchers studied 15 patients, ranging in age from 41 to 75, who underwent heart surgery at the Beijing Anzhen Hospital in China. Through the use of laser-direct infrared chemical imaging, researchers discovered nine types of microplastics were found across five types of tissue, with the largest measuring 469 micrometers in diameter. These included polypropylene (used in food …

Earlier this month, a team of researchers out of the UK, Canada, and New Zealand published a first-of-its-kind study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Hazardous Material Advances, examining the microplastics pollution potential for plastic recycling facilities. The study found that the recycling process, even with plastic pollution mitigation and high removal efficiencies, might potentially discharge tons of microplastics into waterways.

The purpose of the study was to identify if the state-of-the-art unnamed UK plastic recycling facility (PRF) subject to the study discharged microplastics into …