It was the summer of 2021, and that morning, Mehriban Jafarova woke early. At 5:00 a.m., Jafarova got into her car and hit the winding roads of rural Tuscany. Her first stop was a forest full of evergreen holm and downy oak trees common in the region. After climbing a steep hill and swatting away ticks from her cotton clothes, she arrived at what she’d been looking for: an opening in the canopy with a carpet of pleurocarpous moss.

She used her bare hands to collect a sample of moss and placed it carefully into a brown paper lunch bag, ensuring her sampling endeavor was completely plastic-free. Then she was off, hoping to hit a few more sites before the sun went down.

Later, at the University of Siena, Jafarova analyzed her samples and found unwelcome additions clinging to the surface of the braided branches of moss: microplastics. In all, she identified 288 microplastic particles from Tuscan forests, with microfibers and tire particles dominating the collection (Env. Res. 2025, DOI: 10.1016/j.envres.2025.122663).

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