I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.
And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.
So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.
The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.
Thank God someone bothered to check.
>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.
Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.
Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A
https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138
Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll
Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)
Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un
Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though
That should be enough
both the graphic’s title and delicatefury’s comment are misleading.
quote from the sciencedaily article linked above (emphasis mine):
“The researchers emphasize that this does not mean microplastics are not a real problem.
“We may be overestimating microplastics, but there should be none,” said McNeil, senior author of the study and U-M professor of chemistry, macromolecular science and engineering, and the Program in the Environment. “There’s still a lot out there, and that’s the problem.”
Clough added, “As microplastic researchers looking for microplastics in the environment, we’re searching for the needle in the haystack, but there really shouldn’t be a needle to begin with.“”
the gloves are not “the” source (they are the source of stearates, which are mistaken for microplastics) and microplastics still exist in the world (they’re not just stearates in sterile labs getting misidentified as a problem that doesn’t exist), just at a way smaller magnitude than previously thought. this is good news, but microplastics are not a non-issue.
oh absolutely. i thought it was implied that this didn’t mean that microplastics were not a problem at all, just that we actually don’t have accurate information about the scale, due to the glove situation. never hurts to be clear though.
