Using a citizen science approach to assess nanoplastics pollution in remote high-altitude glaciers

Abstract Nanoplastics are suspected to pollute every environment on Earth and reach very remote areas, e.g. via airborne transport. We approached the challenge of measuring environmental nanoplastics by combining high-sensitivity TD-PTR-MS (thermal desorption-proton transfer reaction-mass spectrometry) with trained mountaineers sampling high-altitude glaciers (“citizen science”). We analysed particles − 1 at five of 14 sites. The major nanoplastic polymer types found in this study were tire wear, polystyrene (PS) and polyethylene (PE) particles (41%, 28% and 12%, respectively). FLEXPART modelling was used to reconstruct possible sources of micro- and nanoplastic emissions for those observations, appearing to lie largely to the west of the Alps, where France, Spain and Switzerland have the highest contributions.