The high peaks of the Alps are now polluted with plastic. According to a joint study between Switzerland, Austria and the University of Utrecht, up to 3,000 tons of nonoplastics transported by the atmosphere cover Switzerland each year.
In the Alps, scientists from the Federal Laboratory for Materials Testing and Research (Empa) focused on an area 3,106 meters above sea level at the top of the Hoher Sonnenblick mountain in Austria’s Hohe Tauern National Park. , where an observatory of the Central Institute of Meteorology and Geodynamics has been located since 1886.
And the observation is undeniable: “up to 3,000 tonnes of nanoplastics cover Switzerland each year,” said Empa on Tuesday, January 25, in a press release relayed by the Swiss daily Le Matin. This represents nearly 43 trillion fine plastic particles. Faced with the scale of the phenomenon, the team of scientists has already announced that additional research will be carried out to “verify these values”.
Irrespective of the weather conditions, Empa researchers removed part of the top layer of snow around a marker at 8 a.m. every day. While the origin of the nanoplastics found at the summit could be traced using European data on winds and weather.
Plastic from the oceans
Thus, “it could be proven that the greatest emission of nanoplastics into the air occurs in urban areas with high population density. About 30% of the particles measured at the top of the mountain come from a radius of 200 kilometers, mainly from cities,” revealed Empa. Adding however that “it would seem that plastics from the oceans around the world are also found in the air through the spray of the waves”.
Note that the Alps are not the only European massif to be affected by this pollution. The presence of plastic particles was observed in the Pyrenees by a team of researchers from Grenoble. And much further from us, a scientific study recently revealed that the sea ice of the North Pole contains a high concentration of plastic, showing that the pack ice has now become a veritable reservoir of microplastics.