Every year, a considerable amount of plastic waste breaks down into microplastics, entering the environment alongside human-made microplastics. Sources of this pollution include textiles, tires, general waste, products containing microplastics, as well as equipment used in fisheries, agriculture, and industry. These particles exhibit long-term persistence in the environment due to their resistance to degradation.

While marine microplastic pollution has garnered attention from the public and policymakers, recent reports have highlighted the omnipresence of microplastics in air, soil, sediments, freshwater bodies, plants, animals, and even parts of the human diet, raising further concerns (Environmental and Health Risks of Microplastic Pollution, Scientific Opinion – European Commission).

Proposal for a Regulatory Definition of Microplastics under REACH

On August 30, 2022, the European Commission unveiled its proposal to restrict the market placement of microplastics, expanding the particle size covered and providing a transition period of up to 12 years for certain products. This restriction will be enforced under the REACH Regulation, the EU’s chemical framework. The European Commission’s proposal, which includes revisions and clarifications to ECHA’s original proposal, outlines several key points:

• Redefinition of microplastic size: increase from 1 nm to 0.1 μm for particles and from 3 nm to 0.3 μm for fiber-like particles.
• Introduction of different transition periods for the restriction’s application, ranging from 4 to 12 years depending on the product.
• Exclusion of certain products, such as medicines, fertilizers, food additives, and in vitro diagnostic devices, from the restriction definition.
• Mandating information requirements, such as labels or packaging, for products containing microplastics.
• Establishment of criteria for permitted test methods to identify degradable particles, thus exempting them from the restriction’s application.

The term “microplastics” typically encompasses all plastic particles within the sub-five-millimeter size class, regardless of specific size categories:

• Macroplastics: large plastic litter items exceeding 5 mm in size.
• Microplastics: plastic particles ranging from 0.1 μm to 5 mm in their longest dimension.
• Nanoplastics: plastic particles sized from 1 to 100 nm (0.001 μm – 0.1 μm).

Various shapes of plastic particles are considered, including fragments, fibers/filaments, beads/spheres, films/sheets, and pellets.

Read the last publication from the EU on Microplastics (2023): EU actions against microplastics.

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