Compost-borne nanoplastics pile up in grass roots, with little reaching leaves
Ryzhenko N, Dia A, Pattier M, Davranche M
Composting
If you spread compost on your beds every spring, the plastic fragments hiding in it can build up in the soil and end up inside the roots of the plants growing there.
Researchers tested wild grass growing in fields that had been fed compost for decades. They found microscopic plastic in the soil and inside the plants, and the roots held about four times more than the shoots. Real-world plastic scraps seem to move up through a plant less easily than the perfect lab-made plastic beads used in earlier experiments.
Key Findings
Topsoil in compost-amended plots held up to 28 times more polystyrene nanoplastics than the reference plot, making the surface layer the main exposure source.
Polystyrene signals were detected in roots (123 μg per g dry weight) and shoots (32 μg per g dry weight) of field-grown Yorkshire fog grass.
The root-to-shoot translocation factor was about 0.26 (a conservative semi-quantitative estimate, since shoot levels were near the quantification limit), indicating limited upward transfer compared with lab studies using pristine nanobeads.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Tiny plastic particles from decades of compost use were found inside grass growing in French floodplain fields. Most of the plastic stayed in the roots, and only a small share reached the leaves and stems.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
From compost-amended soil to plant tissues: field quantification of environmentally relevant polystyrene nanoplastics and limited translocation in Holcus lanatus L.
Field evidence for the presence and distribution of nanoplastics (NPs) in terrestrial plants remains scarce. We provide the first in-situ detection and depth-resolved quantification of environmenta...
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Holcus lanatus is a perennial flowering plant in the grass family Poaceae. The specific epithet lanatus is Latin for 'woolly' which describes the plant's hairy texture. Common names include Yorkshire fog, tufted grass, and meadow soft grass. In North America, where it is an invasive species, name...