The negative effects of plastic pollution are even more extensive than thought, with a new study finding that nano- and microplastics pose a serious risk to biodiversity, agricultural production, and global food security.
What's happening?
The study, conducted by a team of international researchers, examined how tiny plastics affect the health and behavior of bees, other pollinators, and insects — and came to a disturbing conclusion.
According to the study's findings, if bees and other insects ingest plastic particles from food or the air, it can injure their internal organs, weaken their immune systems, and even change their behavior, impacting their ability to perform critical services for local ecosystems and agriculture, such as pollination and pest control.
"We find microplastic in the gut of bees and see how wild bees use plastic to build nests," said Alexandra-Maria Klein, co-author of the study and professor of nature conservation and landscape ecology at the University of Freiburg. "We therefore urgently need to investigate what interaction this has with other stressors, such as climate change, for the bees and their pollination services."
Why is pollinators' ingestion of microplastics concerning?
Bees and other beneficial insects are necessary for keeping delicate ecosystems in balance. Flowering plants provide food and shelter for pollinators, which help the plants grow and reproduce by fertilizing them through cross-pollination.
Without pollinators, fruit and vegetable crops are at risk, especially as microplastics increasingly accumulate in soil and water from landscape plastic, rubber mulch, fertilizers, sewage, and atmospheric depositions that disperse them across large areas. As the amount of microplastics in ecosystems continues to increase, so does the potential harm to pollinators, thus endangering the global food supply.
To put into perspective how dire a world without agriculture or farming would be, crops account for 80% of the food consumed by humans and are also necessary for feeding livestock, another crucial component in global food systems for the meat, eggs, milk, fur, leather, and wool they provide. Not to mention that plants account for 98% of the oxygen we breathe, another essential part of human survival that would be impacted by a decrease or loss of the world's pollinators.
What's being done about plastic pollution?
Big Ag is the primary contributor of plastic pollution that accumulates in soil, having been found to use 12.5 million tons of plastic products every year. To reduce the amount of microplastics in pollinator habitats, the amount of plastic used by humans, especially by big agribusiness corporations, must be addressed.
Experts believe this can be done with the intentional use and reduction of plastic products as well as the collection, reuse, and recycling of plastics to curb the amount of plastic particles entering the soil and water.
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Sustainable and eco-friendly alternatives are even better solutions. One example of such is a biodegradable landscape sheet that is in development by a team of biomolecular engineers with support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Engineers are attempting to make a landscape sheet composed of biopolymers that naturally break down in the soil. Researchers are even looking into how to make the landscape sheet nitrogen-efficient, meaning as it breaks down, it would deposit essential nutrients in the soil to help crops grow.
Though solutions are in the works, it is the hope of microplastics researchers and other environmentalists that governments around the world will soon recognize the dangers microplastics present to pollinators and the global food supply and implement policies to curb the use of plastic by Big Ag and other superpolluters.
"It is already clear today, however, that there is a pressing need for political control of plastic pollution," Klein said.
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