One reason plastics are used so often is that they’re chemically inert, meaning bags, food containers, and cups don’t react with what we put in them. Yet they can still break down into microplastics, which turn up in drinking water, human blood, arteries, and brains. The consequences of that are uncertain.
In a new Nature study, Min’s team took a step toward answering this question by demonstrating that microplastics are likely not as chemically inert as we might expect. Min’s lab has spent years working on microdroplet chemistry, studying how water broken into tiny droplets behaves at its boundary with air. These droplets have been reported to generate reactive oxygen species, or ROS, a family of harmful, oxygen-containing molecules.
You could mutate DNA; you could misfold proteins.” Many animal studies have tied microplastic toxicity to oxidative stress, which is caused by ROS. So the team wondered if the boundary between water and plastic might do something similar. In the first test, the team stirred polystyrene powder into water containing methyl orange, a yellow dye that ROS break apart.
Over 10 days, the solution faded almost to colorless, losing nearly 90 percent of the dye. In ethanol or other solvents, the dye stayed intact. Min and his colleagues concluded that whatever chemistry polystyrene was undergoing needed water to happen.
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