Tiny microplastic particles floating through city air stick to spiderwebs, giving researchers a natural way to capture and monitor this form of pollution.
Microplastics, which come from sources like polyester clothing, are being found widely in our food, soil and oceans. But researchers haven’t extensively looked into how many airborne microplastic particles might be present in urban areas. It is a potential concern as these microplastics could be getting into our lungs and may have adverse effects on our health.
at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and her colleagues wanted to see whether they could trace the prevalence of these minute chemicals using spiderwebs. They reasoned that microplastics would be likely to stick to the webs like flies do. “It’s an easily available tracer,” says Scholz-Böttcher.
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Her colleague Rebecca Süssmuth, also at the University of Oldenburg, collected spiderwebs around semi-covered bus stops throughout Oldenburg – luckily, she wasn’t afraid of spiders, says Scholz-Böttcher.
The most common materials the researchers found were polyester, probably from clothing, and tyre fibres that probably originate from vehicles braking in traffic, she says.
It is hard to compare the amounts of microplastics found in spiderwebs with the amounts that humans might be breathing in because so many factors and variables are at play. But Scholz-Böttcher says that this study could be used as a baseline to track the extent of trace particles in the air over time, or to compare the level of microplastics and tyre wear between different locations.
Researchers could also store spiderwebs collected over time to develop long-term records on the amount of these particles in the air.
, an airborne microplastics researcher at Saitama University in Japan, says that there is some potential in using this method for monitoring microplastic pollution, though it might be limited as researchers can’t always ensure webs will be in a particular place. “For true evaluation of spiderweb potential, a laboratory-kind experiment should be done,” he says.
Science of the Total Environment
