{"id":121527,"date":"2021-04-14T07:23:18","date_gmt":"2021-04-14T14:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/plastic-is-falling-from-the-sky-but-wheres-it-coming-from"},"modified":"2021-04-14T07:23:18","modified_gmt":"2021-04-14T14:23:18","slug":"plastic-is-falling-from-the-sky-but-wheres-it-coming-from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/plastic-is-falling-from-the-sky-but-wheres-it-coming-from","title":{"rendered":"Plastic Is Falling From the Sky. But Where\u2019s It Coming From?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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At any given time, 1100 tons of microplastic are floating over the western US. New modeling shows the surprising sources of the nefarious pollutant.<\/p>\n

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If you find yourself in some secluded spot in the American West\u2014maybe Yellowstone, or the deserts of Utah, or the forests of Oregon\u2014take a deep breath and get some fresh air along with some microplastic. According to new modeling, 1100 tons of it is currently floating above the western US. The stuff is falling out of the sky, tainting the most remote corners of North America\u2014and the world. As I\u2019ve said before, plastic rain is the new acid rain<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But where is it all coming from? You\u2019d think it\u2019d be arising from nearby cities\u2014western metropolises like Denver and Salt Lake City. But new modeling published yesterday<\/a> in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/em> shows that 84 percent of airborne microplastics in the American West actually comes from the roads outside<\/em> of major cities. Another 11 percent could be blowing all the way in from the ocean. (The researchers who built the model reckon that microplastic particles stay airborne for nearly a week, and that\u2019s more than enough time for them to cross continents and oceans.) <\/p>\n

Microplastics\u2014particles smaller than 5 millimeters\u2014come from a number of sources. Plastic bags and bottles released into the environment break down into smaller and smaller bits. Your washing machine is another major source<\/a>: When you launder synthetic clothing, tiny microfibers slough off and get flushed to a wastewater treatment plant. That facility filters out some of the microfibers, trapping them in \u201csludge,\u201d the treated human waste that\u2019s then applied to agricultural fields as fertilizer. That loads the soil with microplastic. A wastewater plant will then flush the remaining microfibers out to sea in the treated water. This has been happening for decades, and because plastics disintegrate but don\u2019t ever really disappear, the amount in the ocean has been skyrocketing<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At any given time, 1100 tons of microplastic are floating over the western US. New modeling shows the surprising sources of the nefarious pollutant. If you find yourself in some secluded spot in the American West\u2014maybe Yellowstone, or the deserts of Utah, or the forests of Oregon\u2014take a deep breath and get some fresh air [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":621,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1506,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-121527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/621"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121527"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121527\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}