This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Microplastics. You know, it seems like just yesterday

that environmental scientists were raising the alarm about the tiny beads of plastics in facewash.

And now these tiny invisible polymer particles seem to have warmed their way into everything else on Earth, our water, our shellfish, even our beer.

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before we found them in ourselves.

That's right.

We are full of microplastics.

And here to explain more and chat about other selected subjects in science is It's popular science senior editor, Sophie Bushwick.

Yes.

Nice to have you back.

Nice to be here.

So let's talk about this.

Where exactly did researchers find these microplastic?

So researchers, they had a group of eight subjects from countries all over Europe and Asia, and they essentially

had these subjects keep a food diary for a week, and then at the end of the week, they took

a stool sample from themselves and sent it to the researchers, and then the researchers

had the fun job of picking through that.

They were looking for 10 different types of plastic, and they found these plastic types.

They found nine of them, and they were in all of the samples. Stool samples. So they're going right through our bodies. Yep. We eat them, and then we send them out the other end. Only a matter of time, right, with all the microplastics that are around us. Right. Researchers have found microplastics in tap water, in beer. It's in seafood because a lot of these plastic fragments get into the waterways and then the fish eat them and we eat the fish.

The other thing is that, you know, a lot of us drink water from plastic bottles or food out of plastic takeout containers or that's been wrapped in plastic.

And there's all sorts of chances for fragments to come off.

So the definition of a microplastic is that it's smaller than five millimeters,

but it can be much, much smaller than that.

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