Biochemist Janice Brahney is on one of her sample expeditions. She is out in the field, collecting dust from some highly remote wilderness locations in the western USA, as part of an investigation into how phosphorus might spread in nature via the air.
She returns with her samples to the laboratory – but when she looks at them under the microscope it’s not phosphorus she sees, but something different.
Plastic. The dust includes plastic particles in huge quantities – balls, fragments, thread-like fibres of all kinds and colours. Brahney is so horrified that she decides to pursue an explanation. How is a remote virgin wilderness covered in plastic?
She finds the answer three years later, in 2020 – at about the same time that other scientists are finding plastic fibres high up in the Pyrenees mountains of France, and
