EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT MICROPLASTICS

They're in our blood, our livers, and our brains. They're in newborns and the elderly, urban and rural, rich and poor. What are all these plastics doing to our bodies?

- Carolyn Kormann

In 2019, a toxicologist named Matthew Campen drove into the wilderness of the San Juan Mountains in northern New Mexico with his 12-year-old son. They were working on a school science project about plastic waste, comparing samples from different points along the Rio Grande. In the shadows of the rugged, snow-capped peaks, they knelt at the edge of the river and collected water in glass jars.

Campen had not been surprised when the water samples they collected from around Albuquerque, where they lived, were full of microplastics—pieces of plastic under five millimeters, the size of a grain of rice. But when they analyzed the samples from the seemingly pristine forest in the San Juans, he was amazed to find microplastics there, too. “Even near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, it was super-easy to find these things,” he told me.

Campen, who runs a lab at the University of New Mexico College of Pharmacy, is an inhalation toxicologist who studies the impact of smoking, wildfires, and other respiratory pollutants. “I basically was like, We eat and breathe rocks all the time, and we’re exposed to little particles of diesel,” he said, “so who even cares about plastics?” The results of his son’s experiment shifted his focus.