Microplastic pollution is an issue that’s easy to overlook, but it’s deceptively threatening to both ocean and human health. Microscopic plastic particles are now found in nearly everything on the planet—from the deepest parts of the ocean to inside the cells of living beings.
This collection of new and previously published pieces offers a place to start for addressing this crisis.
Troubled Waters: How Microplastics Are Impacting Our Oceans and Our Health
Join Dr. Britta Baechler (Ocean Conservancy), Christy Leavitt (Oceana), Emily Penn (ocean advocate & skipper), and Madeline Kaufman (Debris Free Oceans) on an exploration of this topic and what we can do in response.
Detergent pods are only the start of clothing’s microplastic pollution problem
Perhaps the most holistic solution would be to regulate and limit the use of plastics for clothing and laundry applications altogether.
June 12, 2025
All that plastic in the ocean is a climate change problem, too
When you think of plastic pollution, you might imagine ocean “garbage patches” swirling with tens of millions of plastic bottles and shopping bags. But unfolding alongside the “macroplastic” pollution crisis is another threat caused by much smaller particles: microplastics.
June 11, 2025
A Poison Like No Other: Excerpt
If you were to somehow instantly remove all the particles from ocean waters and sediments, they’d live on by transferring from gut to gut. Everything eats, everything gets eaten, and microplastics go along for the ride.
June 10, 2025
What scientists have learned from 20 years of microplastics research
At the broadest level, Thompson, other scientists, and environmental advocates are supportive of measures to limit overall plastic production and ban the most problematic categories of plastic, both of which would indirectly reduce the generation of microplastics.
June 9, 2025
Tiny Terrors: Microplastics’ Threat to Our Health and Environment
Plastic is everywhere, and its presence in our lives has grown in the last few decades, as the oil and gas industry ramped up its production to unprecedented levels. The resulting plastic pollution crisis has now entered a new phase in the form of microplastics.
June 5, 2025
A new study finds that microplastics are increasingly present in human brains
A new study has found a dramatic increase in levels of microplastics and nanoplastics (MNPs) in human brains in recent years.
May 29, 2025
Study Reveals Up to 11 Million Tons of Plastic Polluting Ocean Floors
The amount of plastic waste littering the Earth’s ocean floors could be up to 100 times the quantity floating on the surface, according to a study published this week.
May 29, 2025
Microplastic pollution is everywhere, even in the exhaled breath of dolphins – new research
Bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay in Florida and Barataria Bay in Louisiana are exhaling microplastic fibers, according to our new research published in the journal PLOS One.
May 29, 2025
A Dead World, Plastic-Wrapped to Preserve Freshness
If there are future geologists and archaeologists, they will easily identify strata from our fleeting era by evidence of the rapid growth (and decline) of human numbers and their environmental impact, and by durable materials we have left behind—many of which will be plastics.
May 27, 2025
The Taming of the Slough: Humanity’s History of Trying to Control Water (Episode 48 of Crazy Town)
What we do with water matters even more in the era of global warming. Can we learn to treat this most precious of resources in a way that achieves sustainability?
March 10, 2022
Call for Submissions
Have you written or recorded something that addresses the many challenges of microplastics? Please send us your submissions. If it’s a good fit we’ll include your work in this series.
Featured image: Gyre, by Chris Jordan; the image depicts 2.5 million pieces of plastic collected from the Pacific Ocean. Used with permission of the artist.