Special Report: Microproblems

Plastic pollution is turning up in surprising places, for surprising reasons
No matter how dedicated you are to Leave No Trace principles while enjoying the Highlands, you may be leaving something behind.
In 2023, researchers Tim Keyes and Joe Dadey led an expedition of high school students down the Hudson River. They began at the source at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks and proceeded to paddle and hike to New York Harbor. Along the way, they took water samples to measure for microplastics.
As The Current reported in 2019, scientists have found microscopic fragments in the deepest ocean trenches, nearly 7 miles down. They've found them in the most desolate parts of the Arctic, in the rain over the mountains, in the fish, in the water. And they've found them in human poop, because we inhale and consume tens of thousands of pieces each year, which is probably a gross underestimation because scientists haven't yet inventoried every animal or food that absorbs them.
Keyes even found microplastics in samples taken last year at Mount Denali in Alaska. "It was a very low measurement, but it wasn't zero," he said.
Microplastics are defined as particles that measure 5 millimeters or smaller. They are created when plastic items, such as water bottles, are broken down by sunlight or the rocking of waves.

Because the Hudson River flows through heavily populated, industrialized areas, the researchers were not surprised to find microplastics in the water. But they also presumed that samples from Lake Tear, in the high peaks of the "forever wild" Adirondacks, accessible only by trails, would have relatively low amounts.
That was not the case. The most polluted sample measured 28.94 particles per milliliter at Glens Falls. The least polluted was 2.12 particles/ml at the City of Hudson. Lake Tear measured 9.45 particles/ml.
The Lake Tear sample seemed to defy belief. The researchers theorized that its source was airborne pollution. There was precedent: In the 1970s, the Adirondacks experienced a wave of tree and fish die-offs because of acid rain polluted by coal-burning power plants in Ohio. Some alpine lakes still haven't recovered.
This past summer, the researchers returned to Lake Tear for more samples, including from the even more isolated Moss Pond, about a quarter-mile away. Unlike Lake Tear, there's no hiking trail to the pond, only a dense and uninviting bushwack, and it's not a source for the Hudson.
The most recent samples from Lake Tear measured 16.54 particles/ml, nearly twice the amount taken a few years earlier, although Keyes thinks that this summer's lack of rain compared to 2023 may have played a role. However, the Moss Pond samples showed barely any contamination.
That ruled out the airborne pollution hypothesis. And it led the researchers to an uncomfortable conclusion.
"It's coming off the trail," said Keyes. "It's our clothing, our packs and our shoes."
Plastics everywhere
"Microplastics are a foreign object in your body," said Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency who co-wrote a new book, The Problem with Plastic. "You're breathing them in, you're swallowing them."

It was at the EPA that the scope of the plastics problem came on her radar; she's since founded an advocacy group, Beyond Plastics.
"It's not just the plastic," she said. "It's the chemicals used to make plastic that hitchhike on the microplastics. You excrete some of it, but not all of it, and we don't know what the chemical mixture is of the plastic additive, or what is in your body, because they could be made from 16,000 different chemicals."
Enck said that early research has suggested links between microplastics and heart attacks, strokes and neurological disorders. "The microplastics are crossing the blood-brain barrier," she said.
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