Hey, it's Flora and you're listening to Science Friday. You have seen the headlines,

like we've got a spoons worth of plastic in our brains, and microplastics are found in our hearts,

and our lymph nodes, and our bloodstream. It sounds alarming, but the story might be more complicated than it seems.

It turns out that measuring microplastics is really hard to do because, guess what,

we're surrounded by plastics, including the pipettes and petri dishes and gloves that we use in the lab.

Here to tell us more about this challenge and how she's working to get around it is Dr. Cassandra

Rout, who studies microplastics exposure at the University of Queensland in Australia.

Cassie, welcome to Science Friday.

Thank you for having me. It's lovely to be here.

Okay, tell us about this problem. Why is

microplastic measurement a challenge? Okay, so there are a lot of challenges. The problems with the

microplastics analysis is that the field is so young in terms of the science is so young.

So really, we've only been looking at plastics

in the environment for roughly the last 10 years, plastics in humans for the last four years.

So we're very, very early in the technology and in the development to be able to detect them.

And this is really where our research is focused is on how to overcome these challenges.

So one of the biggest challenges we have in the field is background contamination. You covered this really nicely in your

introduction. There are plastics everywhere and there are plastics everywhere in the chemistry lab.

But when you are surrounded in an environment that's full of plastic, these materials can shed

particles and then they can get into the sample that you're analyzing.

So it means when we've been processing the sample, what we've done is accidentally introduced

plastic into it that wasn't there originally.

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