Head down to Sydney’s Manly Cove on a weekend, and you might see groups of people crouching diligently on the sand. They’re not searching for shells or bloodworms, but something just as visually striking, not least because it shouldn’t be there: coloured pieces of hard plastic, fragments of polystyrene foam and fibres from fishing line. For the last three years, a group of volunteers has been surveying the beach each month for microplastics, as part of the Australian Microplastics Assessment Project. Colloquially known as Ausmap, the citizen science project has collected more than 3.5m pieces of microplastic from more than 300 beaches around the country, ranging from Thursday Island in the north to Bruny Island, off Tasmania’s south-east coast. Volunteers collect plastics between 1mm and 5mm in length; pellets, fibres and fragments are meticulously sorted and documented. “That’s what we can see easily in our sieves,” Ausmap’s program director, Dr Michelle Blewit, says. “Microplastic doesn’t always refer to things that are microscopic,” she says. “Obviously it breaks up further and further … the smaller it gets, then there’s more chance of it being ingested by animals.” Blewitt, a marine scientist, says more than 8,500 people have been involved in the project since its launch in 2018. Its goal is to quantify the scale of microplastic pollution across Australia, and help address the growing problem. Read further: https://amp-theguardian-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/amp.theguardian.com/environment/2022/feb/06/australians-ingest-a-credit-cards-worth-of-plastic-a-week-so-whats-it-doing-to-us