• Arthur_Leywin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    "Each liter of cloud water contained between 6.7 to 13.9 pieces of the plastics."

    Anyone know what a "piece" is?

    • JackbyDev@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      Probably a piece of microplastic. Not trying to be facetious. Microplastic already refers to a size of a piece of plastic as opposed to the material in general. Sort of like how gold is a material and a gold nugget is a piece of gold. As for how big this is what Wikipedia says the NOAA says.

      Microplastics are fragments of any type of plastic less than 5 mm (0.20 in) in length, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)[1][2] and the European Chemicals Agency.[3] They cause pollution by entering natural ecosystems from a variety of sources, including cosmetics, clothing, food packaging, and industrial processes.[4]

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics

      • Goodie@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If you read below the fold in the article you get:

        The team identified nine different types of polymers and one type of rubber in the airborne microplastics – ranging in size from 7.1 to 94.6 micrometers.

      • Arthur_Leywin@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So would that mean it is assumed that microplastics are spherical and the length refers to the diameter? So that we could calculate percent concentration by using the volumes.