It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Credit: Byeunggon Kim, Haeleen Hong and Orlin Velev, NC State University
Inspired by naturally-occurring mats and balls of seaweed, researchers have created highly-porous, superadhesive meshes that are capable of capturing both large and small microplastic particles – a longstanding challenge in the field. The mesh can clean microplastics from both saltwater and freshwater and is made from sustainable and widely available biopolymers.
Microplastics – a catch-all term that refers to plastic particles less than five millimeters in size – represent a major pollution problem that poses risks to both human health and the environment. One area of particular concern is the impact of microplastics on aquatic ecosystems, leading to a wide range of efforts aimed at removing these pollutants from water.
Efforts to capture plastic microparticles in water have faced a significant challenge. Some methods can capture larger microparticles – around a millimeter in size. Others can capture smaller microparticles – those measured in micrometers or nanometers. But efficiently capturing both in a single process has been a challenge.
“Our goal here was to develop a multiscale structure that allows us to capture the full range of plastic microparticles,” says Orlin Velev, corresponding author of a journal article on the new work and S. Frank and Doris Culberson Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at North Carolina State University.
Velev and his collaborators drew inspiration from floating mats of seaweed and so-called “Neptune balls” – spherical balls of tangled seaweed – which have been shown to collect microplastics.
“We wanted to create structures that mimicked what the tangled seaweed is already doing,” Velev says.
The researchers created “cleaners” consisting of a mesh of porous fibers made from biopolymers alginate and chitosan, which are derived from seaweed and crustacean shells. The surface of the mesh is covered in a layer of very fine chitosan fibers. This surface layer consists of soft dendritic colloids – structures that branch repeatedly into finer and finer filaments, ending in a tuft-like crown of nanofibers. This structure allows the soft dendritic colloids to stick to almost any surface and to directly capture polymer microparticles and nanoparticles from water.
“What you end up with looks like a fluffy net,” says Velev. “The ‘net’ part of the structure is a mesh capable of capturing the larger plastic microparticles – a millimeter or larger in size. Further, the individual strands of the net are ‘fluffy’ because they are coated with soft dendritic colloids, which are able to capture by adhesion even very small plastic microparticles – down to tens of nanometers in size.”
In proof-of-concept testing, the researchers found their superadhesive meshes were effective at capturing lab-produced model nanoparticles and real-world microplastics across a wide range of sizes, in both freshwater and saltwater.
So, what happens once the fluffy mesh has captured its harvest of microplastics?
The researchers say the loaded mesh could be swept up and reprocessed. One possibility would use microbial digestion to break down the microplastics and the mesh to biosynthesize more of the biopolymer material – for making more fluffy nets.
“We’ve demonstrated that this design works,” Velev says. “And the materials we used are of natural origin and relatively inexpensive. So, it may present a viable path forward. Can it be used on a large scale? That depends on the extent to which we want to invest in scaling up such cleanup approaches.”
The paper, “Artificial Neptune balls: Superadhesive biomimetic networks for broad size microplastics capture and removal,” will be published August 5 in the open access journal Science Advances. First author of the paper is Haeleen Hong, a recent Ph.D. graduate from NC State. The paper was co-authored by Byeunggon Kim and Mesbah Ahmad, both Ph.D. students at NC State.
This work was done with support from the National Science Foundation, under grants 2029327, 2233399 and 2243104.
Researcher holds up a small sample of the seaweed-inspired "fluffy mesh" they created to harvest microplastics of all sizes from aquatic environments.
Researchers find that soil aging of polyethylene microplastics has only a limited effect on their interactions with organic contaminants. Scientists have long worried that aging microplastics in soil could become increasingly effective at interacting with organic contaminants. But a new study shows that this may not be the case for all plastic types. Researchers found that while polyethylene microplastics modify as they age in soil, those changes have little effect on how they interact with various organic contaminants.
For years, scientists have wondered whether tiny plastic fragments (i.e., microplastics) in farmland might behave like miniature chemical sponges-absorbing pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and other organic contaminants, potentially altering their environmental behavior and overall fate. But a new study suggests those fears may have been overstated for all plastics as a whole.
Researchers found that even after spending nearly two years buried in agricultural soil, one of the world's most common microplastics (linear low-density polyethylene, widely used in agricultural films, including greenhouse covers and mulch films) did not become significantly more effective at interacting with organic contaminants. Instead, the study shows that the soil itself-not the plastic-remains the main factor influencing the environmental fate of these chemicals.
Published in Soil & Environmental Health, the study was led by Ph.D. student Yuval Shahar together with Dr. Evyatar Ben Mordechay and Prof. Benny Chefetz of the Hebrew University. To test what really happens under field conditions, the researchers buried fragments of polyethylene previously used as mulch film in three different Israeli agricultural soils for 20 months.
When the team dug up the particles, they found exactly what scientists expected: the plastics had changed. Natural organic matter had coated their surfaces, altering their surface chemistry. Many researchers have assumed that this kind of aging would turn microplastics into increasingly effective "chemical sponges" capable of interacting more strongly with organic contaminants.
But that was not the case.
The researchers tested how the aged microplastics interacted with 48 organic contaminants commonly found in reclaimed wastewater used for agricultural irrigation worldwide, including pesticides, pharmaceuticals, and other wastewater-derived compounds. For about 90% of the chemicals, aging made little or no meaningful difference. The contaminants sorbed only weakly to the plastics and were released just as easily, indicating that the interactions were largely weak and reversible rather than permanently trapping the chemicals.
"Our findings challenge a common assumption that aging dramatically increases the environmental risk posed by polyethylene microplastics," said Dr. Evyatar Ben Mordechay. "Although the particles clearly change after spending months in soil, these surface modifications translate into only minimal changes in their interactions with most contaminants. In agricultural soils, natural soil components remain far more important than the microplastics themselves in determining where these chemicals end up."
The study also found that differences between soils, including their organic matter and clay content, had almost no effect on the microplastics' aging or their interactions with the tested contaminants. Most surface changes occurred within the first year and were mainly associated with the formation of an organic coating, after which the particles remained relatively stable.
The researchers emphasize that microplastics remain an important environmental concern due to the large amounts entering the environment, their high persistence, and their continued accumulation in agricultural soils. However, the new findings suggest that the role of some microplastics in interactions with organic contaminants has likely been overestimated.
"Microplastics are still an environmental problem, but our results help clarify where the greatest risks actually lie," said Prof. Benny Chefetz. "When it comes to the behavior of these contaminants in agricultural soils, the soil itself, not the plastic, is doing most of the work. Understanding that distinction allows us to make more accurate environmental risk assessments and better focus future research and mitigation efforts."
The findings provide one of the most comprehensive real-world examinations to date of how environmentally soil aged agricultural microplastics interact with a broad range of contaminants. Rather than playing a major role in the environmental behavior of organic contaminants, the researchers conclude that polyethylene microplastics play only a minor role compared with the soil itself, whose minerals and organic matter remain the dominant factors influencing the environmental fate of organic contaminants.
Aging of polyethylene microplastics in agricultural soils has minimal effect on sorption and desorption of wastewater-derived organic contaminants
Microplastic particles before soil incubation
Microplastic particles after separation from soil
Credit
Credit: Raz Lev
Microscope image of microplastics particles after soil incubation
Credit
Credit: Yuval Shahar
Cleaning cholesterol from blood also lowered forever chemicals and plastics, and nobody knows why
Physicians at the largest apheresis center in the world report in Brain Health that PFAS and microplastic levels fell in patient blood after treatment, and that plastic particles sit inside human tissue. The mechanism remains unknown.
Reduction of cholesterol after apheresis. Using Raman spectroscopy, the levels of cholesterol and associated lipids in patient blood were measured before and after apheresis using two different apheresis systems, such as filtration and adsorption.
DRESDEN, Saxony, GERMANY, 4 August 2026 — The machine is not new. Some version of it has run in hospital treatment rooms for about four decades, drawing blood from one arm, separating out the plasma, passing it across a filter or an adsorber, and returning it to the other arm. Physicians built it for a narrow purpose: patients whose cholesterol will not come down no matter what they swallow. The center at Technische Universität Dresden performs up to 10,000 such treatments a year, the largest such program in the world. What is new is a question the Dresden team asked of the discard bag, reported on 4 August 2026 in the peer-reviewed journal Brain Health. If the filter catches fat, and if the pollutants in nearly every human body travel attached to fat, what else is coming out?
The Passenger Hypothesis
Consider the scale of the exposure. More than 4700 per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known collectively as PFAS, are in commercial use or loose in the environment. Biomonitoring finds them in the blood of more than 99 percent of the United States population, and roughly 200 million Americans have been exposed through drinking water. Their biological half-lives run from 4.8 to 8.5 years, so a compound absorbed at thirty is still measurably present at forty.
And the exposure does not fall where most people assume. A 2018 meta-analysis pooling five human biomonitoring studies found that higher income predicts higher internal PFAS exposure, not lower: a doubling of income was associated with serum PFOS, PFOA, PFNA, and PFHxS roughly 10 to 14 percent higher. Those authors called it the opposite of the environmental justice hypothesis, pointed to diet, particularly fish and seafood in Europe, and to PFAS-treated fabrics, and stated plainly that the exact cause remains unknown. (Buekers J, Colles A, Cornelis C, Morrens B, Govarts E, Schoeters G. Socio-Economic Status and Health: Evaluation of Human Biomonitored Chemical Exposure to Per- and Polyfluorinated Substances across Status. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2018;15(12):2818. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph15122818)
Plastic arrives by a different door and stays just as stubbornly. Individuals are estimated to ingest 39,000 to 52,000 plastic particles a year, rising to between 74,000 and 121,000 once inhalation is counted. Micro- and nanoplastics have been found in human blood, placenta, lung tissue, and brain.
Now the idea that may fuse two problems into one. PFAS adsorb onto microplastic surfaces at rates up to 250 times higher on environmentally aged plastics, and biophysical work indicates that PFAS partition onto the surfaces of LDL and VLDL. From there the paper advances a hypothesis rather than a demonstration: that both classes of pollutant acquire a coat of plasma lipids and proteins, a so-called corona, which would make the resulting particle larger, more stable, and longer lived in the circulation. The authors are explicit that establishing this will require dedicated mechanistic techniques. But the hypothesis makes a prediction testable in patients today. If the pollutants ride on lipoproteins, a machine built to remove lipoproteins at scale should take some of them along.
What Left the Blood
The established part held. In 34 individuals sampled immediately before and after each of two double filtration plasmapheresis sessions, C-reactive protein and fibrinogen both fell significantly, at P less than or equal to 0.0001. LDL cholesterol and lipoprotein(a) fell after each session, although the second produced no additional significant reduction. None of that is a surprise. It is the daily business of the unit.
The new part came from the mass spectrometers. At Medizinisches Labor Bremen, a certified German reference laboratory for environmental toxins, plasma from 14 patients showed reductions of up to 25 percent in perfluorooctanoic acid, perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, perfluorononanoic acid, and perfluorohexane sulfonic acid, with significance ranging from P less than or equal to 0.05 to P less than or equal to 0.001. An independent laboratory, Creative Biostructure, measured four individuals after a single session and found steeper average decreases: 48.9 percent for perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, 43.5 percent for perfluorooctanoic acid, 55.0 percent for perfluorononanoic acid, 75.8 percent for perfluorododecanoic acid, and 47.1 percent for perfluorodecanoic acid. The compounds were also detectable in the eluate, the fraction the machine sets aside and discards.
"We did not go looking for this," said Stefan R. Bornstein, first and corresponding author, of the Department of Internal Medicine III at University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden. "We have used these systems for years to lower lipoproteins in patients who had no other option. When we finally asked what else was leaving the circulation, two independent laboratories found the same compounds falling in the plasma and turning up in the eluate. It means the machine caught them. It does not yet mean the body is rid of them."
The Plastics Are Harder to Count
Here the data thin out, and the authors say so plainly. Pyrolysis gas chromatography-mass spectrometry on blood from four patients showed polyethylene decreasing in all four and polyvinyl chloride in three of four. Polypropylene decreased in one patient, increased in two, and was undetectable in the fourth. Polystyrene rose in one patient while polyamide 66 fell. That is not a clean result, and presenting it as one would be a disservice.
Two patients treated with double filtration plasmapheresis plus a selective nucleic acid adsorption device, NucleoCapture, produced something more striking. In one, all detectable polystyrene and polypropylene were removed. In the other, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polyethylene terephthalate. No other plastic species remained detectable in either. With a sample size of two the authors call this suggestive, and offer a testable explanation: some circulating plastic may be bound to extracellular chromatin or vesicles, and so removable by adsorption alongside filtration.
A third approach, Nile Red staining with flow cytometry at the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute, found an average reduction of about 70 percent in nanoparticle counts across four patients. That number is arresting and should be handled with tongs. It did not reach significance at that cohort size, and it counts particles without confirming they are plastic, since Nile Red stains hydrophobic substances generally.
Plastic Inside Human Tissue
The circulating measurements are only half of it. Using Raman spectroscopy on human eyelid skin, the team detected and spatially mapped polystyrene particles inside the tissue itself, confirming that these materials do not merely pass through the bloodstream but sit in ordinary human tissue where they can be found and identified. That capability may matter more than any single number here, because it turns tissue burden into something measurable.
A second experiment asked whether the burden does harm. Human adrenal cells of the NCI-H295R line exposed to 30 nanometer polystyrene beads showed a trend toward cell death, measured as lactate dehydrogenase release. Serum drawn before apheresis changed nothing. Serum drawn after apheresis showed a downward trend in that signal. Three replicates. A trend, not a proof.
What the Authors Refuse to Claim
The limitations section is unusually candid, and reporters should read it. Sample sizes are small. Patient indications and apheresis systems were heterogeneous. The plastic assays are exploratory, the field lacks validated standardized methods, and contamination during sampling is a real hazard when the analyte is plastic and the world is full of it. There is no randomized controlled trial and no long-term outcome data. Because patients were not consistently paired across the datasets, the authors state that they cannot claim a shared clearance mechanism.
The most important caveat is temporal. Everything measured here reflects acute post-procedural change in what is circulating. Whether repeated sessions can shift steady-state levels, and what happens to total body burden, remains unknown, and an initial drop may be partly offset by mobilization from tissue reservoirs.
On safety, the record is reassuring without being blank. Therapeutic apheresis is generally considered safe and well tolerated in experienced centers, with adverse events usually mild and transient: hypotension, dizziness, fatigue, nausea, and citrate-related symptoms from anticoagulation-induced hypocalcemia. Allergic reactions occur mainly where donor plasma is used for replacement, which the systems studied here avoid entirely.
The Case for Taking Out the Carrier
That distinction matters. Conventional plasma exchange replaces what it removes with donor plasma or albumin, which may itself carry environmental toxins. Double filtration and adsorption remove targeted substances directly, with no replacement fluid and no second exposure. For lowering a toxic burden, the method that does not top the patient back up has a structural advantage.
"For years we treated the lipoprotein as the disease," said Charlotte Steenblock, senior author, of the Department of Internal Medicine III at University Hospital Carl Gustav Carus, Technische Universität Dresden. "If it proves to be a vehicle as well, the question shifts from whether we can measure these pollutants in people to what happens when we take some of them out."
The urgency is recognized at the policy level. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, within the United States Department of Health and Human Services, has launched STOMP, a 144 million dollar program to build the toolbox for measuring and affordably removing micro- and nanoplastics from the body.
"Let me be clear about what we have not shown," Bornstein said. "There is no randomized controlled trial here. We have not demonstrated that apheresis removes plastic already bound in tissue, and whether it can reach those deposits, perhaps through exosomes or other flux mechanisms, is the key question in front of us. Our next step is to expose large animals to micro- and nanoplastics labeled with radiotracers or iron, image them by PET and MRI, and look again after apheresis. None of this displaces the first priority, which remains preventing exposure. Cleaning up afterwards is the harder and more expensive way to solve the problem. And this is not a disease of poverty. Some of the highest levels are carried by the people who can afford the expensive fish."
What the Dresden group has produced is a first look through a fogged mask, wiped just clear enough to show there is something down there worth swimming toward.
The peer-reviewed research article in Brain Health titled "Therapeutic apheresis: An effective strategy for a combined targeting of circulating lipoproteins, inflammatory markers, PFAS, and microplastics in cardiometabolic and neurodegenerative disease?," is freely available via Open Access, starting on 4 August 2026 in Brain Health at the following hyperlink: https://doi.org/10.61373/bh026a.0024.
The full reference for citation purposes is: Bornstein SR, Kanczkowski W, Walther R, Kronstein-Wiedemann R, Fischer D, Oikonomakos I et al. Therapeutic apheresis: An effective strategy for a combined targeting of circulating lipoproteins, inflammatory markers, PFAS, and microplastics in cardiometabolic and neurodegenerative disease? Brain Health 2026. DOI: https://doi.org/10.61373/bh026a.0024. Epub 2026 Aug 4.
About Brain Health: Brain Health is a high-quality, peer-reviewed medical research journal published by Genomic Press, New York, dedicated to the science of lifelong brain resilience and longevity. The journal’s scope spans molecular and cellular neuroscience, neuroimaging, electrophysiology, computational modeling, clinical trials, epidemiology, digital health, behavioral intervention science, psychology, normative data, and the social sciences and humanities, organized around the question of how human brains remain resilient, recover when injured, and stay functional across the longest possible arc of a life.
Therapeutic apheresis: A possible effective strategy for a combined targeting of circulating lipids, inflammatory markers, PFAS, and microplastics in cardiometabolic and neurodegenerative disease?
Article Publication Date
4-Aug-2026
COI Statement
SRB is on the advisory board of Ayus Medical Group, Medica GmbH, HeinzmMeise GmbH, Kaneka Medical Europe, and BREU GmbH. YPK and PM work at the Ayus Medical Group. MP and CSch are involved in the startup company Proxima Health, working on apheresis technology. AA works at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and is involved in Santersus AG, focusing on the capture and removal of circulating NETs using apheresis. MDW works for Thermo Fisher Scientific, which is in the business of selling flow cytometers and flow cytometry reagents. Other contributors have confirmed that no conflict of interest exists. The study funders had no role in the data collection, analysis, interpretation, or writing of the report. The corresponding author had full access to all the data in the study and had final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.
Reduction of different PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) by double-filtration plasmapheresis (DFPP) treatment.
Micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) measurements of patient plasma before and after double-filtration plasmapheresis (DFPP) treatment.
Therapeutic apheresis: An effective strategy for a combined targeting of circulating lipoproteins, inflammatory markers, PFAS, and microplastics in cardiometabolic and neurodegenerative disease?
Credit
Stefan Bornstein
Sunday, July 26, 2026
Recycling isn't a distraction, but it won't stop climate change either
In research published today, UNSW Sydney behavioural scientists, in collaboration with researchers from Griffith University, say they found no evidence for claims that climate action at the individual level distracted from wanting meaningful action on climate change.
After following almost 2800 Australians over four years through the National Climate Action Survey, the researchers found people who made environmentally friendly choices – recycling, using reusable cups and containers, taking public transport, adopting greener diets and cycling to work – were not less likely to support broader climate action.
That finding contradicts a long-running criticism that governments and companies encourage small lifestyle changes to deflect attention from the harder work of transforming energy systems and regulating industry.
“Individual climate actions neither facilitate nor undermine broader climate engagement,” says lead author Dr Omid Ghasemi from the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response.
“We found no evidence for the idea that personal action might reduce collective action or policy support because people feel they've done enough, overestimate the impact of individual actions, or feel less worried about climate change,” he says.
Instead, the research suggests everyday environmental behaviours are expressions of existing values rather than catalysts – or obstacles – for broader political engagement.
Not a gateway
Australians who took more personal environmental actions in general tended to be more politically engaged overall – and more likely to sign petitions, attend demonstrations and support climate policies. But tracking those same people between 2021 and 2024 showed that increasing someone's personal climate actions did not, by itself, make them more – or less – politically engaged the following year.
“Our research contradicts the strongest version of the 'recycling is a distraction' argument,” says Professor Ben Newell, Director of the UNSW Institute for Climate Risk & Response.
“But it also offers little support for the idea that small lifestyle changes automatically lead people towards activism or systemic reform.”
Dr Ghasemi says the study doesn't dismiss the concern of governments and companies targeting consumer behaviour to shift their own responsibility away from systemic reform.
“Personal and systemic action are not necessarily rivals,” he says.
Beyond public policy
The researchers also detected a small decline in collective climate action and support for climate policy between 2021 and 2024, although personal environmental behaviours remained relatively stable.
Dr Ghasemi says a possible explanation is cost-of-living pressures.
“When people are under more financial pressure, they may have less time, energy, or willingness to engage in collective action or support policies that are perceived to have economic costs,” he says.
“But whatever the reason, our results suggest that it is not driven by greater engagement in individual climate action.”
The findings also carry implications for businesses investing in sustainability programs.
Encouraging employees or customers to adopt greener behaviours may not undermine support for broader climate action, but neither should those initiatives be treated as substitutes for deeper organisational change.
“Doing more personal climate action doesn’t seem to come at the expense of broader climate engagement,” Dr Ghasemi says.
Recycling food waste would bring huge benefits, but microplastics a challenge
A first nationwide look shows diversion of U.S. food waste from landfills could reduce related climate impacts by 89% and nutrient pollution by 50%, UVM researchers say
Keeping food waste out of landfills provides climate and other environmental benefits, and Vermont requires residents to divert these materials to better management pathways. With other states considering similar policies, UVM researchers studied the potential outcomes of bringing these efforts to a national scale.
The new findings, out today in the journal Nature Food, indicate a need to plan not just for channeling food waste into landfill alternatives—but also for managing the microplastics that can remain in the resulting compost and other organic materials, says study coauthor Eric Roy, professor in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources.
Solutions to keep food waste out of landfills include turning it into compost for agricultural use and using anaerobic digestion to produce biogas for renewable energy. While researchers have looked at these disposal options before, none had taken microplastic contamination into consideration at scale, says Roy.
Key findings include that diversion of food waste from landfills to composting and anaerobic digestion at a national scale in the U.S. would reduce the current climate impacts of these wastes by 89 to 99%. Environmental nutrient pollution from food waste management, which can contribute to infamous summer blue-green algae blooms in lakes, could drop by 49 to 54% for nitrogen, and 78 to 98% for phosphorus. But if the organics resulting from composting and anaerobic digestion were spread on agricultural fields, they could also carry around 20,000 tons of microplastics into the soil annually, the researchers found.
“If you don't intentionally intervene and have a plan for how you're going to minimize plastic in your recovered soil amendments, there will probably be plastic there based on just how pervasive it is in our food system right now,” says lead author Kate Porterfield, a Gund Institute for Environment postdoctoral researcher. “It's literally everywhere.”
The work points to the need for better planning at every step of the food recycling process—including the design of packaging before the food’s ever in it, Porterfield says.
Using a combination of data from across the U.S., the team created “life cycle assessment models” to inspect potential effects of nationwide composting, anaerobic digestion, or landfill disposal of food waste. The approach takes into account every step of food waste’s journey, from the moment it arrives at a waste transfer station, to its fate as compost in a field, methane gas converted to electricity, or a slimy pile with plastic, slowly releasing greenhouse gases in a landfill.
The researchers also considered a potential drop in the need for synthetic fertilizers in agriculture resulting from replacement by recovered nutrients in organic wastes—but found that nutrients recovered from food waste would offset only about 2% of annual U.S. demand.
Dealing with food waste is becoming increasingly top-of-mind among some policymakers, with up to 40% of U.S. food wasted, and a quarter of landfills’ already dwindling space taken up by discarded food. Composting food waste has gone from being the domain of avid home gardeners to a legal requirement in some U.S. jurisdictions. Vermont, being an early adopter of required food waste diversion away from landfills, is seeing some of the challenges that can pop up alongside the benefits, says Roy. Additional efforts to increase composting and anaerobic digestion of food waste currently exist as a national patchwork, with tremendous variability from place to place.
Roy, who also directs UVM’s Casella Center for Circular Economy and Sustainability, says he’s not aware of any upcoming national food waste diversion plan. Casella Center research focuses on finding greener pathways for waste management. With more states and municipalities considering food waste recycling, studies like this one can both clarify benefits and reveal potential issues in advance, Roy says, helping to ease the transition. Upfront planning to reduce microplastic contamination in food waste at the outset is needed to maximize the net environmental benefits of food waste diversion programs and policies.
“We thought, we need to think about this at a big scale because Vermont's leading on this issue,” Roy says. “What if more states jump on board?”
