University of Michigan finds lab gloves shed stearate resembling microplastics
Turns out, standard lab gloves might have thrown off a lot of microplastics studies.
Researchers at the University of Michigan found that these gloves can shed stearate particles that look just like microplastics, leading to inflated pollution numbers in past research.
This could mean we've been overestimating how much microplastic is out there, in the environment and even in our bodies.
Clean-room gloves reduce false positives
The team tested seven types of gloves and discovered that clean-room nitrile gloves gave far fewer false positives than regular latex or nitrile ones: latex gloves could create up to 7,000 fake "microplastic" bits per square millimeter!
The researchers now recommend using clean-room gloves (or skipping gloves when possible) for more accurate results.
They've also developed new ways to tell glove particles apart from real microplastics, aiming for cleaner data going forward.