When you think of plastic pollution, you may picture trash washing up on a beach, but microscopic plastic particles are in our air, our water, and even our bodies.
“I think, like a lot of people, I got into microplastics research accidentally by, like, finding it in all of my samples,” said Janice Brahney, an associate professor in watershed sciences at Utah State University. Her lab studies chemical processes in the natural environment.
“So, back in 2017 when I started here, I was really interested in measuring what's in the atmosphere and everything that's in the atmosphere,” Brahney said.
Brahney began measuring particle deposition, or dust, in remote locations across the Western U.S., including the Uinta Mountains in Utah, the Grand Canyon in Arizona, Craters of the Moon in Idaho, and Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Shockingly, she found plastic in every sample. Plastic deposition was unrelated to human activity in the parks, Brahney said, but seemed to correlate with weather patterns.
“So it's not like, what's coming out of the atmosphere is this year's emissions," Brahney said. "We're looking at decades of emissions that have been reemitted to the atmosphere — and so there's just an abundance of microplastics in the atmosphere.”
Brahney said the term “plastic” refers to a broad class of materials made up of hydrocarbons.
“But there are many, many different kinds of plastics, because there's so many different actual chemical compounds and additives to make it soft, to make it hard, to make it this color, to make it that color — and all these different things that are added all change the chemical composition enough that they can't really be commonly recycled together,” Brahney said.
Unlike most organic matter, which breaks down into its molecular components and cycles through the environment, plastic is resistant to decomposing.
“Instead, it just breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces, till it becomes microplastic or even nanoplastic,” Brahney said.
She says the plastic comes from a variety of sources.
“It’s everything, and it's mostly clothing and textiles. Beyond fibers, there are different ways of classifying things like films or particles, also microbeads," Brahney said. "I mean, I've looked at 1000s of samples now, and I see a lot of what looks like labels from pop bottles.”
In 2025 alone, Brahney has co-authored several scientific studies investigating the impacts of microplastic pollution on the atmosphere and environment. She stressed that, while the field of research is relatively new, microplastic pollution is certainly not.
“Just because we noticed it in the atmosphere, you know, less than five years ago, doesn't mean that it hasn't been there for decades and rapidly accumulating," Brahney said. "You know, we cannot keep up with the pace at which we're producing this waste — we don't even have ways to fully study it yet, and already it's overwhelming us.”
Plastic pollution is a real emergency, Brahney said.
“Because of its health impacts, not just to the environment, but to people. And you know, really, it's not just going to be using reusable bags that's going to solve the problem. It really has to be top down,” Brahney said.
