Given that plastic has been around for over a hundred years in various forms, including a huge boom in the 1950s, I assume that we only started finding microplastics when we started looking for them, and that they’ve been with us a lot longer than just in the last decade. Anyone got any ideas or pointers?
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No longer than 70-ish years ago. We only really figured out plastics as a result of all these weird leftover hydrocarbons we ended up with as a result of developing gasoline, and things like Nylon, Polyethylene, etc. only really went into full swing as a result of the WWII industrial machine.
That might be hard to answer, but I remember Hal Roth wrote in his book Two on a Big Ocean about how he and his wife encountered a lot of plastic junk and trash in the islands around Japan during their sailing Voyage. That was in 1967-68.
That’s the earliest example I’m aware of of someone pointing out discarded plastic in our environment.