Since microplastics enter agricultural systems through a variety of means, addressing this issue would require a multi-tiered approach. The Plastic Soup Foundation has a long standing campaign to eliminate the use of plastic microbeads in personal care products. This would likely reduce the amount of plastic that ends up in sewage sludge. The group also supports limiting single-use plastics generally, as these will ultimately break down to microplastics that end up polluting both ocean and terrestrial environments. "We're not anti-plastic," said Vonk. "We feel like plastic can be very useful for certain purposes, but the way we're using it now is just really, really not clever." The European Chemicals Agency has proposed an EU-wide ban on intentionally introduced microplastics, including those in personal care products as well as the slow-release fertilizers and seed coatings used in agriculture. Some states in the U.S. have also moved to ban microbeads from personal care products. To address the plastic mulch issue, Nizzetto said that one helpful step would be to make companies that manufacture plastic mulch films responsible for their recycling and disposal. This would help reduce inappropriate disposal at farms. The use of biodegradable plastics for mulch has also been proposed, but these polymers potentially come with their own set of problems. For instance, one of Huerta Lwanga's studies found that a biodegradable plastic negatively impacted wheat growth more than a conventional plastic used in the study. Also, there has been controversy over whether some "biodegradable" plastics actually degrade into harmless compounds, or whether they just break down into microplastics faster. Such controversy surrounds oxo-biodegradable plastics, which the EU moved to ban in 2019. Another alternative to plastic mulch, developed by researchers at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, involves growing nutrient-sequestering cover crops and then rolling them down to form a thick mat. Farmers then plant into the mat, which itself persists and inhibits weeds, lets water through, and adds nutrients instead of microplastics to the soil. According to the researchers' report, the technique can replace more than 90 pounds of plastic mulch per acre. Gladis Zinati, director of the vegetable systems trial at Rodale and co-author on the report, told EHN that the strategy is scalable to large farms and emphasized the importance of building up healthy soils on farmlands to support long term resiliency. Much more research is needed to paint a complete picture of the scope and impacts of microplastic pollution of agricultural soils. But in the meantime, the plastics will continue to accumulate. "This is a kind of irreversible contamination," said Nizzetto. "There's no way to remediate this kind of contamination at the scale of agricultural soils."