The Uncomfortable Science Around Microplastics

By Dr. Adam Gushgari, Senior Director of Emerging Contaminants

Emerging contaminants is a field that rewards obsession. It is dynamic by nature, and if you don't consistently have your finger on the pulse, you will miss something. The digital compression of the world has enabled scientific discovery to occur at breakneck speeds. Twenty-four-hour news cycles and a sprawling ecosystem of independent digital media mean that any story, at any time, can catch fire and ignite the intrigue of the public. Even regulation, historically a cumbersome and slow-moving process, has been accelerating in response to public demand for action against the worst offenders. The stakes justify all of it. The ecological, economic, and public health consequences of these contaminant classes are staggering, and the urgency is warranted.

The microplastics class of emerging contaminants is a prime example of this playing out in real time. The term was first coined in 2004, purely in a saltwater marine context, and would remain there until the mid-2010s, when environmental scientists focused on freshwater contamination demonstrated that it was not a localized phenomenon. The latter half of that decade solidified microplastics as a ubiquitous environmental contaminant, driven by early domestic and international regulation such as the Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 and a significant expansion of research documenting microplastic presence across virtually all environmental media and many biota, including human tissues. But the real story is that both the research output and public interest trajectories have continued to accelerate without pause. According to Web of Science data cited by the U.S. Geological Survey, annual peer-reviewed publications on microplastics grew from just 4 in 2010 to over 3,500 in 2023. No other comparable class of emerging contaminants has generated that volume of research that quickly.

WHEN SCIENCE MAKES HEADLINES

Perhaps the most consequential chapter in microplastics' short history has unfolded over the last year and a half. In February 2025, Nihart et al. published what would become a defining study on human microplastic bioaccumulation, analyzing kidney, liver, and brain tissue samples collected in 2016 and 2024. Three findings drove the paper's impact: brain tissue harbored concentrations notably higher than kidney or liver; individuals with a dementia diagnosis at death showed markedly elevated brain concentrations compared to controls, though the authors stopped short of claiming causation; and 2024 samples contained significantly more microplastics than their 2016 counterparts, consistent with rising global plastic production. The paper caught the field's attention immediately. At the time of writing this document, Google Scholar reports 719 citations in just 14 months – a staggering number. In November 2025, nine researchers published a formal challenge in the same journal, citing potential analytical interference in lipid-rich tissue matrices, insufficient contamination controls, validation gaps, and limited sample sizes. This ignited a debate across the microplastics research community, and scientific consensus has not yet been reached. In a field with stakes this high, that scrutiny is not only appropriate, it is necessary.

And in the background of this contentious expert debate, the demand for microplastics regulation has continued to grow and research output has continued to accelerate. On April 2nd, 2026, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced the inclusion of microplastics as a priority contaminant group in the draft sixth iteration of the Contaminant Candidate List (CCL6), marking the first time in the program's history that microplastics have been elevated to this status. In tandem, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced the Systematic Targeting of Microplastics program, known as STOMP, aimed at developing a comprehensive toolkit for the measurement, research, and removal of microplastics and nanoplastics in the human body. The field now sits at a genuine crossroads: considerable methodological debate among the world's leading researchers on one side, and the most consequential step toward federal regulation the United States has taken on the other.

DEFENSIBLE SCIENCE AT MEANINGFUL SCALE

The potential ecological and public health impacts of microplastics are significant, and the drive toward regulation is warranted. But a critical balance must be struck between scientific rigor and economic reasonableness. Given the ubiquitous nature of these compounds, broad and routine analytical monitoring across environmental and human matrices is likely necessary. However, if the bar for required methodologies is set too high, requiring multiple detection methods across multiple instruments for confirmatory purposes as some peer-reviewed literature has suggested, we risk handicapping the entire process before it begins. Budgetary constraints will limit the number of samples we can analyze, leaving an incomplete picture, or drive a movement away from monitoring altogether. Neither outcome serves the sustainability of our natural or built environments, nor the future of public health. Eurofins has approached this challenge deliberately, investing in established and validated microplastics analytical capability, including gold standard Raman spectroscopy at our Sacramento laboratory, driven by scientific consensus rather than regulatory mandate. With a global peer group of microplastics experts and six centers of excellence spanning Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and North America, we have built the infrastructure to support scientifically defensible, scalable monitoring, and with over 85 environmental laboratory locations across North America alone, the capacity to expand that capability rapidly where it is needed.

The most productive path forward on microplastics regulation runs through collaborative effort across government, leading academic researchers, and key industry players. There is precedent for this kind of relationship, both domestically and internationally, and it has produced some of the most impactful environmental regulations ever implemented. While the most consequential action may ultimately be taken at the local, state, and federal levels, the global scale of plastic production and the ubiquity of microplastic contamination make clear that this is not a problem any single country solves alone. The research has not occurred in a geographical vacuum, and neither should the response. We must leverage the collective knowledge of the entire field, reaching across countries and continents, to address this challenge swiftly, accurately, and in a scientifically defensible way. Eurofins has spent years building exactly this kind of collaborative foundation, working alongside regulators and academic partners globally to develop research and analytical frameworks that have moved the needle in the environmental sciences. That work continues here, and we intend to be at the table as this chapter of microplastics science is written.