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From soil to slugs to songbirds: How plastic is moving through ecosystems
For many people, "plastic pollution" calls to mind pictures of turtles and other marine life drowning in single-use plastic bottles and discarded fishing nets. My own research looks at how the same story is playing out on land.
Plastics are increasingly found in small mammals, insects and the soil. But how it moves through these ecosystems—and the damage it might be doing—is still poorly understood.
My own research into this started during my master's degree. I wanted to find out if plastic pollution was affecting UK mammals—and the results were startling.
Colleagues and I first looked at the feces of a range of small UK mammals. We then used a special machine that detects infrared light to identify different types of plastic.
We found plastics in the feces of European hedgehogs, wood mice, field vole, and brown rats. Of the 189 hedgehog samples, 19% contained plastics. In one sample alone I was shocked to find a total of 12 pink and clear fibers of polyester. This is the UK's most popular wild mammal, and no one knew they were ingesting plastic.
Where the microplastics came from
As part of my ongoing Ph.D., the next step was figuring out how this plastic was getting into the hedgehogs in the first place. Hedgehogs feed on invertebrates like beetles, snails, slugs, earthworms, caterpillars and woodlice. We wanted to see if those creatures could themselves be contaminated by plastic.
We collected over 2,000 invertebrates and soil samples from 51 sites in Sussex, England. The sites covered farmland, grassland and suburban areas.
To trace how plastic might move through the food web, we sampled creatures at various different points in the food web (known as "trophic levels"). This meant plant-eaters, like peacock butterfly caterpillars, and earthworms and other animals that feed on dead plants. We sampled omnivores who will eat all sorts, like the red-footed soldier beetle, and carnivores like ladybirds and ground beetles, who eat other animals and are found higher up the food web.
After we had grouped the invertebrates by both species and location, we had 530 samples to analyze. We recently published our results in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.
Overall, plastic showed up in 12% of the invertebrate samples. Earthworms had the highest rate at 29%, followed by snails & slugs at 24%. Interestingly, the types of plastic found in carnivores didn't match those in herbivores and dead plant-eaters. That suggests the carnivores are not just getting it from eating contaminated prey—they might also be picking up plastic as they move through the soil or even from airborne particles that land on their next meal.
We also found the first evidence of plastic in species of caterpillar like the peacock, powder blue and red admiral butterflies, and in beetles such as ladybirds.
The most common plastic we found was polyester, probably from clothing and furniture. Other common plastics were those used in single-use packaging, agricultural materials (such as fleece, mulch film, greenhouse films and silage wrap), and even paint.
So, does it matter if a few slugs or worms are ingesting plastic? Absolutely.
Invertebrates play important roles within their ecosystems. Earthworms, for example, add air to the soil and help cycle nutrients. Therefore, when they consume plastic, it affects the animals that prey on them, the soil they live in, and even the food we grow.
In fact, plants grown in plastic-contaminated soil have been shown to take microplastics into their cells. This can stunt their growth and limit the water they can retain, and ultimately reduce our ability to grow the food we need.
Insect-eating birds like swifts,thrushes and blackbirds are also ingesting similar plastic, likely from their prey. This can stunt their growth, damage organs, and make them less fertile.
It is too easy to place the responsibility solely on individuals to avoid single-use packaging, recycle more, and avoid synthetic materials. These things make a difference, of course, but big polluters must be held accountable. That means fast fashion companies, drinks giants, supermarket chains and the agriculture sector, which all produce a huge amount of plastic waste and have failed to take responsibility for the damage this causes.
If we want to protect ecosystems from plastic—on land as well as at sea—we need more than personal action. We need serious accountability, better waste management, and real investment in truly sustainable alternatives.
Author: Emily Thrift
This article is republished from THE CONVERSATION under a Creative Commons license. Read the
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Plastic packaging could be a greater sin than food waste
An estimated 4.7 million tons of edible food is thrown away by households each year in the UK, according to the Waste and Resources Action Program, an environmental charity that runs the Love Food Hate Waste campaign. This wastage seems especially wrong at a time when escalating food prices have driven many British households to become reliant on food banks.
Meanwhile, the single-use plastic packaging used to reduce food wastage poses a more insidious problem. Once discarded, the single-use plastics that cushion, seal, protect and extend the shelf life of our groceries can linger in landfills, beneath the ground, in rivers and on the seabed for centuries.
This mounting plastic waste could disrupt ecosystems, negatively affect food security through declining animal health and cause health issues in people. If binning good-to-eat food has historically been reviled as consumers' great moral failing, their over-reliance on single-use plastic food packaging could be a longer-lasting sin.
UK households throw away approximately 90 billion pieces of plastic packaging a year. In 2024, the UK achieved a recycling rate of approximately 51%–53.7% for plastic packaging waste.
The rest was incinerated, land-filled, or shipped abroad, typically to countries with weaker waste management systems. There it is buried, burned or haphazardly stored with the risk of leaking into rivers and seas.
Traces of plastic have been detected everywhere from Arctic ice to the hottest deserts, from the bellies of seabirds to human blood, lungs and placentas. Unlike food waste, the damage of plastic waste is cumulative, slowly imparting a toxic legacy throughout ecosystems for future generations.
The scale of the single-use plastics problem is not to diminish the problem of food waste. Throwing out a pack of mackerel filets or a tub of smashed avocado from the fridge is not only disrespectful to the third of UK children under five living in food insecure homes. It disregards the huge amount of carbon emissions needed to produce, preserve, transport, retail and store those items from producer to consumer.
An estimated 16 million tons of carbon dioxide is produced from UK households' wasted consumable food and drink. But damaging as it is, food waste has an end point: it decomposes, breaks down, then returns to the soil.
In contrast, plastic packaging persists indefinitely, slowly fragmenting into smaller parts and disintegrating into stubborn chemical constituents that stick around. Each plastic bottle, crisp packet and meat tray that ends up in the natural environment represents a long-term alteration of the material world.
Food waste decays, plastic stays
Why then does binning plastic packaging rarely invite as fervent a reaction as scraping a plate of uneaten dinner into the bin? Our research suggests that part of the answer lies in how each act of wastage is morally framed.
Food is very visible, desirable and morally loaded—it is something held dear in most religions and communities. Several faiths explicitly denounce the wasting of food as sinful or wrong. Secular British history too is replete with memories of food shortages, rationing, rising prices and austerity periods which have led to strong moral attitudes against food waste.
According to the anti-poverty charity Trussell Trust's research, approximately 14 million people in the UK faced hunger in the past year leading up to September 2025.
By comparison, plastic is more abstract. Plastic food packaging is hidden in plain sight, often serving as a "passenger" rather than a driver of our consumption. After we remove the food, we toss plastic packaging into the trash—ideally the recycling bin—without a further thought.
Where food is deep-seated in moral and even sacred meanings around nourishing the body, sharing and caring, identity and celebration, plastic is devoid of such values. Throwing food away can feel like an affront to the communities we identify with, but binning plastic does not carry the same stigma. We do not view ourselves as "wasting" plastic, we merely "dispose" of it.
Among the members of 27 households we interviewed, many expressed their frustration about good-to-eat food ending up in bins or landfills. Most cited the usefulness of plastic packaging in keeping food fresh and helping to reduce waste.
For them, the consequences of binning plastics are dispersed and delayed. No great cautionary tale from our collective memory exists to warn us of the complex, longer-term challenges that will follow.
To overcome the challenges of tomorrow, we must reassess the hierarchy of things that we, as consumers, feel guilty about. Food waste certainly matters, but so too does plastic packaging. The problem is that plastics have not been a part of our moral economy for very long.
Plastics arrived as a modern convenience, not as a moral appendage to our sense of identity or community like food has been for millennia. There are no ancient and collective traumas tied to plastics' wanton consumption, abuse or scarcity, no prayers of gratitude for plastic packaging, and no great piety or moral proverbs condemning its thoughtless disposal.
Our existing moral frameworks are colored with images of hunger, famine, bread lines and emaciated bodies that provide us with the imagination to condemn the wasting of food.
But we require new stories and perspectives to position plastic waste as an evil that will outlive us, haunt our waterways, crowd the stomachs of wildlife, leach into our food systems, and poison our bodies long after our shopping habits have changed.
This article is republished from THE CONVERSATION under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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