According to a new study, harmful microplastics are not only stored in agricultural and urban soils, but also in forests. The majority of the tiny plastic particles enter the forests from the air and accumulate in the forest soil. ‘Then, in deciduous forests, the particles are transported to the forest soil by rain or the autumn leaf fall, for example.’There, leaf decomposition plays a central role in storing pollutants in the forest soil, as the authors further discovered. They also produced a model estimate of atmospheric inputs since the 1950s in order to determine their contribution to total storage in forest soils. "Our results indicate that microplastics in forest soils originate primarily from atmospheric deposition and from leaves falling to the ground, known as litterfall.