Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumPlants Can Absorb Tiny Plastic Pieces Through Their Roots, Study Finds
Yessenia Funes
Monday 11:00AM
Nothing seems safe from the grips of plastic these days. Not national parks, not oceans, and, according to new findings, not even plants. The study, published in Nature Nanotechnology on Monday, found that plants can absorb the tiniest bits of plastic through their roots. It shows the wide-ranging ways that plastic can impact the natural world.
The group of researchers looked at the ability of plants to absorb plastic in a lab setting. They directly exposed Arabidopsis thalianaa weed that goes by thale cressto plastics smaller than 100 nanometers. For context, a sheet of paper is 100,000 nanometers thick, so were talking extremely small pieces of plastic. The team of researchers assessed how far the plastic traveled into the plants, as well as its impact on the plants biology and genetics.
To study the plant, the scientists grew the thale cress in both dirt soil and an agar-based soil medium that has similar nutrients to the soil, which allowed them to more easily study the roots because separating them can cause damage when theyre in regular soil. In each setting, the plants were exposed to a varying amounts of nanoplastic, including 10, 50, and 100 parts per million as well as a control group with no plastic. They let the plants grow in these levels of soil for 10 days in a growth chamber heated to roughly 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius) before taking a look.
The authors took into account concentrations of microplastics measured [in] soils, Phoebe Stapleton, an assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Rutgers who has studied nanoplastics but not as part of this study, wrote in an email to Earther. Therefore, these doses were not for laboratory trials only but represent concentrations that are found within the environment.
More:
https://earther.gizmodo.com/plants-can-absorb-tiny-plastic-pieces-through-their-roo-1844117397?utm_source=earther_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2020-06-24
The Velveteen Ocelot
(115,281 posts)progree
(10,864 posts)maybe lagging behind by 20 years ... but plastics in everything in ever-increasing (exponentially growing) concentrations ... at some point, it becomes "Houston, we have a problem"