This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter

In Shaping Our Shores, the film I featured in last week's article on the shocking plastic pollution levels on Scotland's beaches, a litter picker, wading through a burn, pulls with a garden at a scrap of plastic weighed down by stones and silt in the bed, and tugs out a tatty sheet of plastic bag.

The man is Adrian Laird-Craig, an ‘extreme litter picker’, and as he unfurls the fagged sheet, he points out how it is disintegrating into fragments, over time becoming microplastics which float "down into the marine environment".

The mirror of the litter we find on Scotland's beaches is the microplastics found in our seas. Last year, data released to The Ferret through freedom of information by Marine Scotland showed that the highest concentration of microplastics found in Scotland was in a sample taken from the Solway Firth, and contained 210,891 microplastics per square kilometre.

The issue of micro plastics is one I touched on only briefly last week, but given their increasing accumulation across most parts of the planet, from Antarctica to the deep oceans, as well as in multiple organs of own bodies, I thought I'd touch on the micro as well as the macro.

Microplastics are, of course, a global problem. Only last week, I read a paper, published by University of Manchester scientists that showed significant concentrations of microplastics in the male reproductive system of sea turtle - and that slightly less, but still significant levels of microplastics were found in other organs of both male and female turtles.

Often the focus is on marine litter and what plastics are doing to the life of the ocean. The story of what has happened to these turtles, who mistake plastic bags for jellyfish or algae and consume them, is tragic. But we don't have to be a fish or a turtle swimming in the sea, to consume and find ourselves made of these microplastics, gradually becoming some kind of plastic borg.

We as humans are swimming in our own sea of plastic. We drink from plastic bottles, we microwave plus meals and plastic containers, chew gum that releases micro plastics into our saliva.

There are multiple ways these tiny fragments arrive in our waters, soils and air. These include microfibres shed from clothing, plastic glitter scattered, nanoplastic particles released from the wearing of vehicle tyres, the breakdown of larger plastics into tiny fragments.

Research by The James Hutton Institute has looked at one of the ways it can arrive in our soils - through sewage sludge, spread as........

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