Honest question, why is the study of microplastics and its causes a recent thing? Are better instruments involved somehow? Plastics with their special properties have always been known to be "unnatural", even used as a synonym for that word, so one would think we would have kept an eye on them from the start.
It's the current trend in selling the fear of climate change caused by fossil fuels. People get desensitized to prior campaigns, like oil drilling, pipelines, gasoline cars, and plastic bottles in the ocean and straws in the rivers. Microplastics push the fact there's something foreign in your own body, and that's disgusting.
