Avoiding and reducing microplastic false positives from dry glove contact (pubs.rsc.org)

Summary: dry contact with nearly any laboratory glove will lead to sample contamination and over estimation of microplastics. They found one type of clean room gloves that contaminate less.

Is there any indication on how bad this really is?

There is growing evidence that there is much less to worry about on microplastics on several fronts.

1. A whole cohort of core studies have been judged to have invalid methodology due to not recording baseline microplastic levels (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2411099121)

2. Young-onset cancers (especially colorectal cancer) which were inferred to be caused by a rise in microplastics are being linked explicitly to other mechanisms and cohorts. (https://ascopubs.org/doi/10.1200/JCO.2025.43.16_suppl.3619)

Now, I'm worried about people preparing my food with gloves.

This shouldn't really be a problem. Just use aseptic techniques to avoid glove contact (direct, indirect, and airborne) with the test material.

I feel the field of microplastics has done itself no favours by referring to everything < 5mm as a microplastic particle. 5mm is huge. In american terms, it's amost as wide as a .22 calibre bullet, or a popcorn kernel