New measuring method reveals there may be more plastic “on” than “in” your salad

Original title: 'New measuring method reveals there may be more plastic on than in your salad' (less readable, may look like an omission by mistake ("more plastic on what, than in the salad?)")

> It's now possible to measure how many plastic particles there are in our food. [Researchers] now label[led] the plastic particles with ... Europium, [which] doesn't occur in organisms naturally, so every europium particle you measure represents an ingested plastic particle. ... In both lettuce [«a real water guzzler»] and wheat, the concentration of plastic remained ten times lower than in soil, and the particles remained mainly attached to the roots

The article also note a special legal status that polymers seem to have, and academical advocation for a consistent regulation across all particles of concern.

Original research article: More information: Yongming Luo et al, Quantitative tracing of uptake and transport of submicrometre plastics in crop plants using lanthanide chelates as a dual-functional tracer, Nature Nanotechnology (2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41565-021-01063-3