I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.
And there are so many articles and videos and discussions. Like, the scientific community is buzzing about this.
So much research will have to be redone because the data was absolutely compromised, off by orders of magnitude, by using standard lab gloves.
The world is probably not horrifically contaminated by microplastics. Sterile laboratories, however, are contaminated by latex and nitrile gloves.
Thank God someone bothered to check.
>I just googled this and… yes, it’s absolutely real.
Sources beyond dude just trust me, for the skeptics.
Scientists may have been unknowingly inflating microplastics pollution estimates, and the surprising source could be their own lab gloves. A
https://www.technologynetworks.com/applied-sciences/news/scientists-lab-gloves-may-be-causing-an-overestimation-of-microplastics-411138
Nitrile and latex gloves that scientists wear while they are measuring microplastics may lead to a potential overestimation of the tiny poll
Nitrile and latex gloves may cause overestimation of microplastics - Phys.org (it’s a pdf)
Researchers discovered a standard piece of lab equipment has added thousands of microplastic ‘false positives’ per each square-millimeter un
Ordinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data: That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though
That should be enough
how did they not fucking account for this. sorry but this is really really stupid
this is so funny.
@3liza they didn’t account for it because they didn’t realize it was an issue. The particles the gloves are shedding are not microplastics but they are similar enough in composition and under an electron microscope that because the scientists didn’t know to account for them, they didn’t realize that’s what they were seeing.
Also they DID account for contamination in WET sample preparation, because they’d already learned previously that the nitrile gloves could contaminate wet samples, but this was the first discovery that they were contaminating DRY or AIRBORNE samples as well.
All of this was very clearly laid out in just the last provided link - i didn’t even have to read all of them to learn this, I read like 3 paragraphs of the nautil.us article and I was able to learn what happened and why it hadn’t been accounted for.
Like, I understand the frustration, but this is the sort of thing that has to be DISCOVERED before it can be accounted for, and this is what that kind of discovery looks like, and berating scientists for not already knowing something science hadn’t yet learned is kind of a pointless and bad faith approach to things.
We’ve learned that a lot of the studies done on microplastics in our environment were not actually accurate, and had unintentionally incorrectly inflated numbers of microplastics in their samples due to this issue, which means that while microplastics are still obviously a problem, they’re not as overwhelming large of a problem than we thought! This is a good thing! Science has done its job and we have learned new things and can now do even better science! There’s no reason to be angry at or berate the scientists who’ve gone before. We know better now. That’s the important part.
