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 µm for common polymers (polyethylene, polyethylene terephthalate, polypropylene, polyvinyl chloride, polystyrene and tire wear particles), revealing nanoplastic concentrations ranging from 2–80 ng mL− 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.