What the water carries, by Dr Lena Haverford

An original contemporary magazine article.

Every Monday I walk down to the footbridge over the River Calder with a stainless steel bucket, a long rope and a glass jar. I lower the bucket, fill the jar with exactly two litres of river water, screw on a metal lid and carry it back to the laboratory, where I spend most of the week looking for things, many of them smaller than a grain of sand.

These are microplastics: fragments, fibres and beads of plastic less than five millimetres long. In our last survey, the average sample contained thirty-four of them. Most were fibres, shed by synthetic clothes in washing machines and carried through the drains to the river.

The hardest part of the job is keeping my own plastic out of the results. I wear a cotton lab coat instead of the usual polyester one, I never use plastic bottles or tubes, and I leave an open dish of clean water on the bench beside me. If fibres land in that dish, I know they have come from the air in the room, and I subtract them from my count.

I used to own a cupboard full of fleece jumpers. These days I own two, and I wash them in a special bag that catches the fibres before they reach the drain.

(a) What was the average number of microplastics in each sample in the last survey? (b) Give one thing the writer does to keep her own plastic out of the results. (c) What does the final paragraph suggest about how her work has affected her?