Survey Finds Nanoplastics From Tires In European Alps, Along With Polyethylene And Polystyrene

Particles from vehicle tyre wear are the biggest source of nanoplastic pollution in the high Alps, a pioneering project has revealed. Expert mountaineers teamed up with scientists to collect contamination-free samples and are now scaling peaks to produce the first global assessment of nanoplastics, which are easily carried around the world by winds.

Millions of tonnes of plastic waste are dumped in the environment and much is broken down into small fragments. Microplastics were already known to have polluted the entire planet, from the summit of Mount Everest to the deepest oceans.

However, nanoplastics are even tinier and have been difficult to collect and analyse. Researchers are concerned about the health impact of ubiquitous plastic pollution, and nanoplastics may be even more dangerous than microplastics as they are small enough to penetrate cell membranes and remain lodged in the body. “We were really glad that these initial results [from the Alps] were good,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany. “Then we thought about what to do next, and said: ‘Let’s go crazy, let’s do it globally.’”

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Prof Andreas Stohl, at the University of Vienna, who was not part of the study team, said a global map of nanoplastics would break important new ground. He said nanoplastics were of particular concern for health as, unlike most microplastics, they could penetrate the lungs and enter the bloodstream. The Alpine samples were collected in summer, and Stohl said that could complicate the interpretation of the results. Summer melting could concentrate the nanoplastics or in other circumstances flush them away, he said, and snow that had lain for months could collect nanoplastics from different source regions as the winds changed.

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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/feb/04/vehicle-tyres-found-to-be-biggest-source-of-nanoplastics-in-the-high-alps