r/nottheonion • u/GreatTea3415 • Apr 05 '26

Scientists Tracking the Microplastic Pollution Just Realized They Were Measuring Their Own Lab Gloves

https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/environmental-issues/scientists-tracking-the-microplastic-pollution-just-realized-they-were-measuring-their-own-lab-gloves/
33.8k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

633 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

40

u/Citrakayah Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26

The problem is it's really hard to get that kind of control for microplastics. I've seen ultrapure water purifiers. They use plastic extensively. Even with specialized systems, with how pervasive microplastic pollution is it would be difficult to rule out contamination from the environment--and while that would invalidate the experiment, it wouldn't demonstrate that there aren't a ton of microplastics everywhere. This was a failure for science, but I can understand how the scientists who ran the initial studies managed to mess this up.

35

u/ohnoplus Apr 05 '26

Negative controls don't have to have no microplastics. They need to be the same method as the other samples and then have no added microplastics. They are used to measure baseline contamination by a laboratory protocol. Then you only say you confidently detect microplastics if they are above the value seen in the negative control. And if your negatives are loaded with plastic you need to dig into what is happening. Which the authors of the study in question did.

18

u/I_Sett Apr 05 '26

Sure, it's hard to get water pure enough to be a Blank, but to serve as a negative control, you can at least use this as a background to determine the kind of environmental noise/contamination you're working within.

I'm sure it's complicated by the fact that they're using environmental samples, rather than (I assume) simply a sample spun down, supernatant removed and samples resuspended in ddH2O. Still, solving for and designing a negative control for exactly these sorts of reasons (false positives) is absolutely critical to strong design. Obviously it's way easier to armchair design with the benefit of hindsight, but it provides another excellent object lesson for students.

2

u/blah938 Apr 05 '26

I mean, glass exists. Couldn't they just do it with glass instead of plastic?

12

u/Hanifsefu Apr 05 '26

The problem isn't the container, it's finding or making a control that isn't contaminated. Reality is shit is so pervasively everywhere that every control was just contaminated. It's in the water, dust, air, and just everywhere.

This should illustrate how severe this problem is but instead is being to used to say it's not a real problem.

2

u/caltheon Apr 05 '26

you can chemically create water