Tiny bits of plastics from everyday use items could be traveling in the atmosphere across entire continents, carried by winds, a new study found.
Most of our plastic waste gets buried in landfills, incinerated or recycled -- but up to 18 per cent ends up in the environment.?
Though plastics take a eons to decompose, it fragments into smaller pieces until the microplastics are small enough to be swept into the air.
"Akin to global biogeochemical cycles, plastics now spiral around the globe," said the study, led by researchers from Utah State University and Cornell University, and published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"We found a lot of legacy plastic pollution everywhere we looked; it travels in the atmosphere and it deposits all over the world," said lead author Janice Brahney in a news release from Cornell. "This plastic is not new from this year. It's from what we've already dumped into the environment over several decades."
The research team collected atmospheric microplastic data from the western United States during 2017 to 2019, and found an estimated 22,000 tons of microplastics are being deposited across the US each year.
According to the study, the US, Europe, Middle East, India and Eastern Asia are hotspots for land-based plastic deposition.