- [Lyda] If you're just walking down the street, you have the cars.

All cars now are made out of plastic.

You have some of the paint chips on the road are plastic.

Water bottles, plastic cups, takeout food containers.

It's in our beer, it's in our table salt, it's in the air, it's in shellfish, it's in meat, it's probably in your salad because lettuce comes in a plastic container.

Plastic is in everything.

Microplastics exist in the ocean.

The entire world is connected by oceans, and so it's really everywhere.

(soft dramatic music) - [Narrator] Microplastics, pieces of plastic less than five millimeters and more than one micron in size, are everywhere.

That might be a scary thought, but at least Dr. Lyda Harris is watching the problem.

As a Microplastics Fellow at the Seattle Aquarium, she gets an up close look at how these tiny particles affect the waters and creatures around us.

And her typical day at the beach is probably a lot different than yours.

- Sometimes you can get things that look like that, but we have to do polymer analyses on it to figure out what exactly it is.

A plastic bag or water bottle, it doesn't just degrade back to the carbon chain.

It will break apart into smaller and smaller pieces before it can do that, so these water bottles can be in the environment upwards of 100 to 500 years.

I found a stand-up paddle board fin, quite a few wrappers, some bottle caps, this very fun number 11 torpedo.

So the white cotton lab coat is just to reduce contamination on all levels, plus I look really good.

(laughs) - [Narrator] For all the disturbing implications microplastics bring, scientists are only just beginning to understand this new field of study.

- The term microscopic plastic was first published in 2004.

Since then, the field has been growing at an exponential rate, and we've been doubling the quantity of publications every year, which is wild.

(laughs) We're finding microplastics pretty much everywhere we look.

In the snow, in Colorado mountains, in the Arctic where people just don't really inhabit.

I personally wasn't aware that fleeces were made out of plastic, that glitter was made out of plastic, that all of these things that I was using on a daily basis were made out of plastic, and so for someone to be getting a Ph.D. in this field and not know a lot of it, I think that says a lot about what we expect the general population to know.

Which isn't much.

It's like a treasure hunt.

A really depressing treasure hunt.

- [Narrator] For Lyda, it's not just about getting people to skip takeout containers or buy sustainable T-shirts.

It's about changing the way we think and our relationship to everything we buy, sell, and consume.

- [Lyda] When you think about capitalism and consumerism, we're also consuming at a rate that we've never consumed before.

It's not just where we can point to something and say that is the problem, it is society or the producers of the plastic items, which are a whole different beast than individual actions.

Because it's a systemic problem, it really needs to be attacked at the source, and so the source isn't the store.

The source is the petro chemicals.

The source is those fossil fuels that are making the plastic.

The part that really bothers me about this research is how much plastic I produce in trying to study how much plastic is in the ocean.

It's all plastic that ends up in our waterways.

It's clogging stomachs of whales and sea turtles and albatross and seagulls.

- [Narrator] While we don't know all of its cascading effects on ecosystems, we do know microplastics can have drastic effects on marine life.

Chemical pollutants like DDT and PCBs attach to these particles and they can suppress hormones, immune systems, and fertility when animals ingest them.

- There's estimates that there's going to be more plastic in the ocean than fish by 2050.

And that's just getting bumped up every year.

Oh!

Yep, there's some plastic in here.

My hope for the future is that people wake up and realize what is happening.

- [Narrator] To put it bluntly... - Scare the (beep) out of people.

Being someone who studies this field, it can be really overwhelming.

It can be really sad, it can be really depressing.

It's very sobering to realize that this might be the cleanest we see our oceans in the future, like, today might be the cleanest it will be.

But there is also the thought of what I'm doing matters and what I'm doing, while it's not gonna change society today, it can change society in the future.

These are all of the ones we've counted so far.

- [Narrator] If Lyda has indeed scared the (beep) out of you, that's the point.

But her second point is to shake you out of that fear and take action, because you can.

And it's easier than you might think.

You can help by staying curious and engaged, supporting and spreading the news from scientists, so that more people understand the problem and support scientific innovations that could one day break down microplastics safely within the environment.

It won't always be easy, but it'll be worth it.

- I wake up every day and some days it's really hard, it's really hard to do the work that I do and be happy about it.

And other days, when that happens, it can also be a motivator to do it.

(seagulls calling) (waves stirring)