Miniscule fragments of plastic pollution invade the human body every day without our knowing it, not just from eating and drinking but from simply breathing.

By some estimates, the average person inhales a credit card’s worth of plastic every week with unknown health effects. In 2022, scientists found microplastics hiding in the deepest parts of the human lung for the first time.

When breathed in, experimental evidence strongly suggests that such tiny plastics have the capacity to trigger inflammation, oxidative stress, lung tissue damage, or systemic dysfunction in the respiratory tract. So far, however, research on the potential health outcomes of microplastics is mostly confined to animal models and human cells.