Microplastics—an almost invisible class of plastic fragments smaller than a grain of rice—have become one of the planet’s largest unseen pollutants, accumulating across soils, seas, and even inside the human body.

1. Most microplastics don’t come from bottles or bags.

The vast majority are shed from everyday materials — synthetic clothing fibers, tire wear, and urban dust — not from visible litter.

2. They’re already everywhere.

Scientists estimate roughly 7 million tonnes of microplastics now sit across oceans and agricultural soils — a global layer of pollution spread by runoff, wind, and wastewater.

3. And they don’t stay outside us.

These particles have been detected in human lungs, blood, and placentas, highlighting that the pollution we can’t see is already moving through the food chain and our own bodies.

Data Notes

Percentages from IUCN (2017) global estimate of primary microplastic sources.

~21 Mt total combines Elsevier (2023) agricultural soil and PLOS ONE (2023) ocean-surface and deep sea estimates.

Values are approximate; freshwater, river, and airborne plastics not included.

5 Related Facts

🌬️ Microplastics fall from the sky — atmospheric studies show plastic particles in rain and remote mountain air.

🪸 The deep sea is a major sink — seafloor sediments may hold more plastic than the surface ocean.

🥬 We eat and drink them — bottled water, table salt, and some produce all contain measurable microplastic traces.

🧽 Laundry is a key source — a single wash of synthetic clothing can release hundreds of thousands of fibers.

🚗 Tires are the biggest emitters on land — rubber wear from driving creates billions of tiny particles yearly.

Notes from the designer

Sometimes it's what we can't see that is the most dangerous. Study after study is uncovering the magnitude of this pervasive pollutant, and the research on its effects on the environment and ourselves is in its infancy. I personally have struggled with visualising the concept, defaulting to "little balls of plastic" as my mental image. In doing research for this graphic, I was shocked at the variety and scope of what is classified under this heading. Visualising them at higher fidelity has helped me grasp the overall problem better and the part I play in it.

Hope it does the same for you!

Dataset

Data Sources

https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/2017-002-En.pdf

A growing plastic smog, now estimated to be over 170 trillion plastic particles afloat in the world’s oceans—Urgent solutions required

As global awareness, science, and policy interventions for plastic escalate, institutions around the world are seeking preventative strategies. Central to this is the need for precise global time series of plastic pollution with which we can assess whether implemented policies are effective, but at present we lack these data. To address this need, we used previously published and new data on floating ocean plastics (n = 11,777 stations) to create a global time-series that estimates the average counts and mass of small plastics in the ocean surface layer from 1979 to 2019. Today’s global abundance is estimated at approximately 82–358 trillion plastic particles weighing 1.1–4.9 million tonnes. We observed no clear detectable trend until 1990, a fluctuating but stagnant trend from then until 2005, and a rapid increase until the present. This observed acceleration of plastic densities in the world’s oceans, also reported for beaches around the globe, demands urgent international policy interventions.

PLOS OneMarcus Eriksen ,

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969723019137

Frontiers | Microplastic Pollution in Deep-Sea Sediments From the Great Australian Bight

Interest in understanding the extent of plastic and specifically microplastic pollution has increased on a global scale. Still one large piece of the overall…

FrontiersJustine Barrett