Hey, it's Science Friday producer Kathleen Davis, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Microplastics and nanoplastics have been in the news a lot. These are teeny tiny pieces of plastic fragments that are found pretty much everywhere. They've been found in the soil, in the water, in our bodies, even on

the top of Mount Everest. And it all feels overwhelming and existential. But there's some good news,

too. Just this week, the EPA announced it's taking the first step to regulate microplastics

in drinking water. And lots of scientists are looking for solutions for our

microplastic malaise. And here to fill us in on some research happening in the Midwest is

Kate Grumke, senior environmental reporter for St. Louis Public Radio. Hey, Kate, thanks for being here.

Hi, Kathleen. Thanks for having me. So Kate, as an environmental reporter, what's your level of personal concern on microplastics?

Like, where do they rank on your list of topics that are big and scary that you cover?

Oh, man. Well, we have a lot of scary weather events here.

So I would say that those can be maybe bigger or more urgent feeling than microplastics.

But the thing about microplastics is you can end up thinking about them quite a lot because

there's so much plastic in our daily life. So I feel like I have just constant reminders

of this issue because there's so much plastic around us. Right. So as I said,

microplastics are everywhere. Has there been anything in your neck of the woods that has made you

be like, okay, this is actually very freaky? Oh, definitely. So one story I wrote about was

about a group of scientists at St. Louis University. They recently found

microplastics in a cave around here that had been closed to the public for 30 years. So there's

a population of endangered bats in this cave. So people are generally not allowed to go in there.

And they found a lot of microplastics. And they found it in both the

water and in sediment in the cave. And one thing that was really interesting, they published a

paper about this, that they found it even more during flooding. So the caves around St. Louis are

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