>>12959030Fuck. Wrote a large response on mobile but something happened and it disappeared. I'll try again:
Micro and nanoplastics are being generated both on land and in the ocean. In the ocean, zooplankton and molluscs ingest them directly, which then goes up the trophic levels by predation, bioaccumulating in animals, as nanoplastics have been confirmed to cross the gut lumen.
My research area is on plants. A study adding extremely small particles of polystyrene to hydroponic wheat documented multiple negative and positive effects for the plant, but the scariest part is that these particles were found both in root tissue and leaf veins. My experiment didn't explicitly use nanoparticles, but rather polyethylene microparticles sub 500µm, but by microscope inspection I found particles down to 27µm which is still generally considered too large to have effects on plants and enter tissue. The issue is that the plant response nearly exactly matches the responses in the previously mentioned study, which highly suggests that there are still nanoplastic particles. This both confirms that nanoplastic can exist in field conditions in soil (hasn't really been documented yet due to technical limitations and separation from soil).
Since nanoplastics were found both in the root and leaves in the study mentioned, this also suggests that it's possible that nanoplastics can enter vegetables and especially root vegetables. Fruit - idk, but it's not too farfetched.
Normally plastics have mostly been found in seafood, tap water, beer and of course it breaks off and enter your stomach when you use plastic tools and such. Atmospheric microplastics have also been found to adhere to leaves. Normally this isn't too much of a worry, as the sizes need to be extremely small to pass the gut lumen and blood-brain barrier, but the nanoplastics found in the root tissue are small enough to do both of these things. It means we are likely being exposed to all of this on a daily basis.
