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The Microplastics Brief
One short email, most Tuesdays: what changed in microplastics research this week, and what's actually worth doing about it. Five minutes to read, every claim traced to a primary source.
We aggregate and fact-check published, peer-reviewed science — we don't run a lab, and we don't do fear-mongering. When the honest answer is “this headline overstates the study,” that's what we'll tell you.
Get The Microplastics Brief
Most Tuesdays, five minutes. You'll also get our room-by-room Plastic-Free Swap Checklist (97 items, printable) as a welcome gift. Unsubscribe anytime — one click, no guilt trip.
What's in every issue
- The newest studies, decoded. What each one actually found, its design and sample size, and what it does not show — the same format as our public research tracker, where every entry carries a resolvable DOI.
- One viral claim, fact-checked. Like the “you eat a credit card of plastic every week” claim — we traced it to its primary sources and the corrected math works out to roughly one credit card per 23,000 years.
- One swap that's actually evidence-backed. Not a panic purchase — the single change with the best published support that week, and why.
- What we updated or corrected. Subscribers hear first when a study gets superseded or we fix an error — every fix is also logged publicly on our corrections & updates log, permanently.
The fine print, up front
Cadence, honestly: “most Tuesdays” means most Tuesdays. If there's nothing worth your five minutes in a given week, we skip the week rather than pad an email.
How this gets paid for: GiftedPicks earns Amazon affiliate commissions on some product links on the website — never in the emails themselves (see our affiliate disclosure). No fake urgency, no fabricated testing claims, no invented social proof — in the emails or anywhere else.
Your email: used for the Brief and nothing else. Unsubscribe is one click at the bottom of every email, or reply “unsubscribe” and a human will do it.
You set the agenda: every issue asks what claim we should fact-check next. Replies go to a real inbox and genuinely set the research queue.
Don't want another email? Start here instead
Everything the Brief is built on lives on the site, free and ungated:
- The Plastic-Free Swap Checklist — 97 common plastic items, room by room, and the swap for each.
- The Microplastic Exposure Calculator — estimate your annual intake from your actual habits, anchored to peer-reviewed data.
- The Microplastics Research Tracker — a dated, citable index of the landmark primary studies, each with a “what it does not show” line.