Your Gloves Are Contaminating Your Microplastics Research

Here's a quiet methodological crisis in environmental science: a new study finds that simply handling samples with dry nitrile or latex gloves can shed enough plastic fibres to register as microplastics in your results. That means a significant chunk of published microplastics data could be inflated by the very protective equipment researchers use to avoid contamination. It's a brutal irony. The [research published in Analytical Methods](https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2026/ay/d5ay01801c) shows the problem is specifically worse with *dry* glove contact. Wet or moistened gloves shed far fewer particles. The fix sounds almost too simple — keep gloves damp during sample handling — but the fact that this hasn't been standard protocol tells you how young and unregulated microplastics methodology still is. This matters beyond the lab bench. Microplastics research directly feeds policy decisions about plastic regulation, food safety limits, and environmental standards. If baseline contamination levels are artificially high because of glove contact, regulators may be working from numbers that don't reflect reality. That's not a minor calibration issue; it shapes legislation. The study also calls for cleaner reporting standards — researchers should document glove type, condition, and handling protocol the same way they document instrument settings. Right now most papers don't. Reproducibility in this field is already shaky, and undocumented contamination sources make it worse. If you're doing microplastics work or reviewing it, treat undocumented glove protocol as a red flag from today onwards.