In 2016 a team of scientists scoured a dozen beaches around the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland – not for flora or fauna, but for litter. In particular, plastic litter.

It wasn’t hard for them to amass quite the collection of discarded common everyday objects. These included bottle tops, cotton buds, pens, toys and straws. They picked up lesser identified fragments too, such as blocks of polystyrene foam, the kind that keeps fragile goods soft in the post.

Collecting this debris wasn’t the team’s main goal, says Montserrat Filella from the University of Geneva. Instead, they wanted to assess whether chemicals emitted from these plastics were harmful.

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Their analysis comes at a time when the world is uncomfortably waking up to the extent of human-caused plastic pollution – from islands of amalgamated plastic in our ocean to the smaller microplastics in riverbeds.

