Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Little more than a century after the widespread adoption of plastic, microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs) have wormed their way into every corner of the environment—including our own bodies. “Over the past two decades, plastic as an emerging pollutant has become a global issue because of its widespread distribution in every environmental compartment of the Earth system,” the authors wrote. Related Story How to Eliminate Microplastics from Your Kitchen“Airborne plastics pose substantial health risks because of their rapid atmospheric transport,” the authors wrote. “A critical prerequisite remains unquantified: the size-resolved abundance of atmospheric plastic particles and their fluxes across Earth’s environmental compartments,” the authors wrote. “Major efforts are currently underway to develop rapid and reliable methods for identifying, quantifying, and characterizing atmospheric MPs and NPs in environmental samples.”