When Cassandra Rauert was new to her job as an analytical chemist studying microplastics in human tissue, the idea occurred to her: “Maybe I should test my blood?” This was six years ago, and scientists had known for decades that tiny plastic particles were contaminating the world’s soil and wreaking havoc on marine life, but they were just calculating how microplastics were also making their way into our bodies. Rauert and colleagues at the Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health Sciences (QAEHS) in Brisbane, Australia, were looking for answers.
When her results suggested she was full of polyethylene, Rauert was shocked, but also skeptical. “Biologically, it doesn’t make sense for blood to turn into plastic at that rate,” she reasoned. Her momentary question set the stage for innovations that will advance the fight against the ubiquity of microplastics.
Since then, the headlines about the microplastic scourge have become even more breathtaking. We consume the weight of a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. However, in reality, reliable data is difficult to obtain. Imagine streaming songs from your phone’s speakers during a rock concert. It is indistinguishable from the music coming from the PA. When testing for the presence of plastic, the background noise is the 9 billion tons of material that humans have produced since the 1950s and is present in nearly every aspect of our lives. And if we can’t determine exactly how much plastic is in a piece of fish or a vial of blood, how can we regulate or improve it?
A few months after Rauert had her blood tested, the director of QAEHS approached her for advice. A charity called the Minderoo Foundation, which sponsors research into microplastics and human health, has agreed to fund the construction of a one-of-a-kind laboratory that is almost completely free of plastics and their toxic chemical additives. Can Lauert help design and build it?
She assembled a team and spent the next six months diligently testing the plastic content of building materials. The result is an airlocked, 250-square-foot facility built almost entirely of stainless steel and dubbed the “Submarine.” However, it feels less like a submarine and more like a spaceship from an galaxy where plastic never took over modern life.
The microplastics suspended in solution here are typically defined as particles between 5 millimeters and 1 nanometer wide.
The lab is officially known as the Minderow Institute for Plastics and Human Health, and the background levels of plastics inside it are “at least 100 times lower” than in traditional labs, Rauert said. Researchers can handle samples without worrying about contamination. That means Rauert and his colleagues can finally begin to determine which testing methods are more likely to produce false positives and other misidentifications for microplastics (and even tiny nanoplastics) in human tissue. Reliable testing can help answer important questions about where microplastics settle in the body.
Some of the first peer-reviewed studies conducted in the clean room were published last year with Rauert as lead author. One very common method for detecting microplastics turns out to be unreliable at distinguishing between polyethylene and other chemicals in blood. In other words, Mr. Rauert’s initial blood test was questionable — and so might that intimidating headline.
That doesn’t mean microplastics don’t pose a danger to humans, a fact Lauert knows better than anyone. Correlative evidence suggests links to dementia, premature birth, and other problems. But Rauert also knows that scientists can’t analyze these risks with sketchy data. That’s why she and her colleagues didn’t just build a clean room, they open-sourced its design and made the process and plans public so institutions could replicate it.
