“You can take a spectrum but it’s practically meaningless unless you have a database to go back and do the fingerprint matching,” he said. Figuring out what material the fingerprint belongs to is the challenge.

But to address it, scientists need to know which plastics are moving from land into water.Ĭhris French, the laboratory director at Eurofins S&N Labs and a study coauthor, said getting the spectrum, or the fingerprint, is the easy part. Study after study has confirmed that microplastics are a global problem. They are ingested by marine mammals, permanently entering the food chain. Those plastics get weathered and eroded down into microparticles the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen or nearly-invisible fibers. Scientists estimate that more than 11 million tons of plastic are dumped into the world’s oceans every year - the equivalent of dumping a garbage truck full of plastic into the ocean every minute. Researchers can use the library to figure out what kind of plastics are entering the ocean, where they are coming from and what we can do to keep them out in the future. Scientists at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and MBARI recently published an open-access library - a collection anyone can use for free - of the chemical fingerprints of microplastics and other particles that are commonly found in and around the ocean.

And, as we continue to find microparticles in unexpected places - from local anchovy and seabird guts to the deepest trenches of the ocean - identifying those fingerprints is increasingly important.

We don’t often think of plastics as having “fingerprints.” But they do.

Future comin out strong suspect