Microplastics Have Been Found in People's Poop-What Does It Mean?

Everywhere scientists have looked for they have found tiny bits of degraded plastics-including, now, in human poop. Some people have been eating plastic particles and excreting at least some of them.

Although the study is a small one, it is likely that microplastics can be detected in the human body, and that it may be more likely to occur.

Microplastics include fragments smaller than five millimeters (the diameter of a grain of rice) that results from the breakdown of larger debris, such as bottles, in the environment. They are also made of synthetic fibers and plastic beads. They have turned up all over the world to be around the world. But until there were no direct samples of humans.

Stools seemed "the most promising place to look in humans for the first time," says study co-author Bettina Liebmann of Environment Agency Austria. Detecting microplastics in poop is tricky, though. She and Philipp Schwabl, of the Medical University of Vienna, thought that it would be possible to break down the organic matter of microscopic plastics.

The team collected samples from eight participants across Europe and Asia, who were instructed on how to minimize contamination from, for example, the fibers that are continually floating in the air-the bane of many microplastics researchers. The scientists badyzed the stools for microplastics ranging in size from 50 micrometers to five millimeters. "We were quite astonished that we found microplastics in every single sample," Liebmann says. They include polypropylene (used, for example, in bottle caps), polyethylene terephthalate (used in drinks bottles) and polystyrene (used in food containers). Although they could not identify the exact source of each particle, the findings "confirm that we are surrounded by plastics in our everyday life," she says.

The work, presented October 23 in Vienna at the European Gastroenterology Week, an annual meeting of experts in digestive health, serves as a jumping-off point for further research. Liebmann and Schwabl hope to launch a larger study with more people, and more and more people. They also hope to be of greater dimensions of plasticity and are more likely to be able to penetrate the body and the body.

The new research suggests at least some microplastics (at the upper end of the size range) are being excreted by the body, which Liebmann calls "a good sign." It remains unclear, though, how is coming out compared to what might still be left in the body. "We're just missing the frame of reference," says Martin Wagner, an ecotoxicologist at Norwegian University of Science and Technology who was not involved in the new study.

Future work will also need to explore what, if any, negative health impacts microplastics might have on the body via physical damage to the gut or other organs, or due to the introduction of plastics' chemical additives. Scientists do not yet know how microplastics may be different in this regard from other indigestible particles to which humans are exposed. "We need to know, is it really toxic?" Wagner says. "We're blind on that."

But with the new work, Liebmann says, "now we know how to tackle the problem, and we have the tools at hand" to start looking at microplastics in humans. "Now we have the proof that there is something that is worth looking at."