A type of zooplankton found in marine and fresh water can ingest and break down microplastics, scientists have discovered. But rather than providing a solution to the threat plastics pose to aquatic life, the tiny creatures known as rotifers could be accelerating the risk by splitting the particles into thousands of smaller and potentially more dangerous nanoplastics.

Each rotifer, named from the Latin for “wheel-bearer” owing to the whirling wheel of cilia around their mouths, can create between 348,000 and 366,000 nanoplastics – particles smaller than one micrometre – each day.

The animals are microscopic, ubiquitous and abundant, with up to 23,000 individuals found living in one litre of water, in one location. The researchers, from a team led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, calculated that in Poyang Lake, the largest lake in China, rotifers were creating 13.3 quadrillion of these plastic particles every day.

Plastic can take up to 500 years to decompose. As it ages, tiny pieces break off. Physical and chemical processes are known to break them down, including when exposed to sunlight or when waves grind bits of plastic against rocks, beaches or other obstacles floating in the ocean.

The scientists sought to examine what role aquatic life might play in microplastic creation, especially after the discovery in 2018 that Antarctic krill are able to break down polyethylene balls into fragments of less than one micrometre. Baoshan Xing, a professor of environmental and soil chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Stockbridge School of Agriculture, said they decided to look at rotifers because they had specialised chewing apparatus similar to krill. They wanted to test the hypothesis that rotifers, of which there are 2,000 species worldwide, could also break down plastic.

“Whereas Antarctic krill live in a place that is essentially unpopulated, we chose rotifers in part because they occur throughout the world’s temperate and tropical zones, where people live,” said Xing, the paper’s senior author.

The animals mistake microplastics – fragments of less than 5mm in diameter – for algae, he said.

After exposing marine and freshwater species of rotifers to a variety of different plastics of different sizes, they found all could ingest microplastics of up to 10 micrometres (0.01mm), break them down and then excrete thousands of nanoplastics back into the environment. Polyethylene microplastics from food containers as well as nanoplastics were detected in the rotifers bodies.

Xing said their work was “just the first step”. “We need the scientific community to determine how harmful these nanoplastics are,” he said. “We need to look at other organisms on land and in water for biological fragmentation of microplastics and collaborate with toxicologists and public health researchers to determine what this plague of nanoplastics is doing to us.”

Studies have shown that nanoplastics are probably more dangerous for living organisms than microplastics because they are more abundant and reactive.

If rotifers can produce 13.3 quadrillion nanoparticles a day in Poyang Lake, then the amount created worldwide is immeasurably greater. Each microplastic could theoretically be broken down into 1,000,000,000,000,000 nanoplastic particles, which are then more easily spread.

Microplastics have contaminated every corner of the planet, from the top of Mount Everest to the depths of the Mariana Trench, and research has shown they are in many humans’ blood and heart tissue and the placentas of unborn babies. They cause harm in human cells in the laboratory at levels known to be eaten by people via food.

Jian Zhao, a professor of environmental science and engineering at the Ocean University of China and the paper’s lead author, said nanoplastics were not only potentially toxic to various organisms but served as carriers for other contaminants. The release of chemical additives in the plastic could be enhanced during and after fragmentation, he added.

Plastic waste is “spiralling out of control” across Africa, where it is growing faster than any other region, new analysis has shown.

At current levels, enough plastic waste to cover a football pitch is openly dumped or burned in sub-Saharan Africa every minute, according to the charity Tearfund.

If the trend continues unabated, the region is projected to end up with 116m tonnes of plastic waste annually by 2060, six times more than the 18m tonnes of waste produced in 2019. The main driver of rising plastic consumption in sub-Saharan Africa, where 70% of the population is under 30, is demand for vehicles and other products amid rising income and population growth.

Overall, plastic use worldwide is projected to almost triple by 2060.

The soaring demand for plastic predicted across sub-Saharan Africa, where many countries do not have the capacity to manage it, was revealed before a meeting of governments in Nairobi, Kenya, next week to hammer out a UN treaty to fight plastic pollution.

Rich Gower, senior economist at Tearfund, said: “The signs of environmental breakdown are all around us, but this treaty has the potential to curb the plastics crisis and improve the lives of billions of people.

“Much of the plastic being used in sub-Saharan Africa is plastic packaging and ends up being dumped and burned,” he added. He urged negotiators in Nairobi to agree to significant reductions in plastic production and to put waste pickers, who dispose of 60% of global plastic waste, front and centre of the treaty.

In the absence of global rules and regulations, people living in developing countries and the waste pickers who dispose of the waste, disproportionately bear the brunt of the environmental and health impacts of plastic pollution.

Dr Tiwonge Mzumara-Gawa, from Malawi, a waste campaigner who will be at the negotiations in Kenya, said: “While these negotiations continue, the health of people in Malawi and across Africa is being impacted by plastic pollution every day.

“In Malawi, we see burning and dumping of plastic waste every day, harming people’s health . These negotiations have shown that change is coming, but it will not come easily. There are some who profit from this plastic crisis and want to keep ambition as low as possible.”

An open letter to representatives of the Africa Group and others attending the negotiation in Nairobi, signed by 80 bishops and church leaders, said the region was facing “mountains” of mismanaged plastic waste.

A few miles across the river from the site of the UN conference is the Dandora landfill site, where 30 lorryloads of plastic waste are dumped every day. It is a breeding ground for mosquitoes, flies and vermin, increasing the risk of malaria, cholera, diarrhoeal disease and other illnesses.

In May, before the last round of negotiations of the plastics treaty, John Chweya, the head of the waste pickers in Kenya, who has been instrumental in pushing countries to recognise the world’s 20 million waste pickers, said he wanted justice for collectors, as well as healthcare, a proper income and better working conditions, to be included in the treaty.

Tearfund’s analysis is based on statistics from a database of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and is published in Global Policies Outlook.

Big drinks companies are misleading customers with claims that their plastic water bottles are fully recycled or recyclable, according to consumer groups who have issued a formal complaint to the European Commission.

The Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs (BEUC) said claims that water bottles from brands owned by Coca-Cola, Danone and Nestlé are “100% recyclable” or “100% recycled” are misleading because recycling rates are far lower in practice and bottles contain items that cannot be made from recycled material. The consumer rights group, which represents national groups across Europe, also said green imagery on bottles gave the “false idea” of environmental neutrality.

There is no guarantee that a plastic water bottle will be recycled, said Ursula Pachl, deputy director general of BEUC. “This greenwashing must stop.”

Drink bottles are among the most common forms of plastic polluting European beaches. In a year, the average European drinks around 118 litres of bottled water, according to the BEUC, 97% of which is thought to come in bottles made from plastic.

But the amount that gets made into new bottles depends only partly on factors that the company or the customer can control. Other factors include the systems used to collect, sort and recycle the bottles, as well as technical limits and rules around what materials can be used to package food and drink.

The BEUC has lodged a complaint with the European Commission over the phrase “100% recyclable” because a consumer cannot assume their water bottle will be recycled. Across the EU, about half of PET bottles are recycled, according to estimates from Zero Waste Europe.

The BEUC has also targeted the phrase “100% recycled” because bottle lids in the EU cannot be made of recycled materials. It also said that labels are rarely made from recycled material.

Last week, a report from campaign groups ClientEarth, ECOS and Zero Waste Europe found rates of plastic bottle recycling were improving, but that a fully circular system does not exist. “The idea of used bottles simply becoming new bottles over and over again may be appealing to companies and consumers alike, but it does not reflect the outcome for PET-based bottles in Europe,” the authors wrote.

The EU has cracked down on greenwashing as corporate sustainability claims have grown. In September, the European parliament and council agreed on new advertising rules banning generic sustainability claims like “climate neutral”, “natural” and “eco” unless backed up by proof of excellent environmental performance.

There is a lot of concern about plastic pollution and a lot of confusion about recycling, said Rosa Pritchard, a lawyer with ClientEarth, which supported the BEUC challenge. “Consumers are just tired of greenwashing, generally, and really want information they can count on.”

The BEUC has the power to issue external alerts – formal complaints about suspicious business practices – to the commission and the Consumer Protection Cooperation Network. The commission cannot fine traders who are found to have breached advertising rules but national authorities from EU member states may choose to do so.

Nestlé and Coca-Cola did not respond to a request for comment. Danone said: “We strongly believe in the circularity of packaging – and will continue to invest and lead the campaign for better collection and recycling infrastructure alongside our partners. We have also made real progress on our journey to reducing single-use plastic and virgin plastic use in parallel (-10% in absolute since 2018).”

Anglers in Venezuela have been raking up oil spills and collecting plastic waste from Lake Maracaibo to try to save the lake that sustains their livelihoods.

President Nicolás Maduro has ordered the implementation of a “rescue, attention and decontamination” plan for the 13,000 sq km lake, one of South America’s largest and one of the oldest in the world. Years of inadequate waste management and neglect of oil industrial infrastructure have polluted the lake, which harbours two-thirds of the country’s oil reserves – and production is expected to increase.

Microplastics have been found everywhere from the oceans’ depths to the Antarctic ice, and now new research has detected it in an alarming new location – clouds hanging atop two Japanese mountains.

The clouds around Japan’s Mount Fuji and Mount Oyama contain concerning levels of the tiny plastic bits, and highlight how the pollution can be spread long distances, contaminating the planet’s crops and water via “plastic rainfall”.

The plastic was so concentrated in the samples researchers collected that it is thought to be causing clouds to form while giving off greenhouse gasses.

“If the issue of ‘plastic air pollution’ is not addressed proactively, climate change and ecological risks may become a reality, causing irreversible and serious environmental damage in the future,” the study’s lead author, Hiroshi Okochi, a professor at Waseda University, said in a statement.

The peer-reviewed paper was published in Environmental Chemistry Letters, and the authors believe it is the first to check clouds for microplastics.

The pollution is made up of plastic particles smaller than five millimeters that are released from larger pieces of plastic during degradation. They are also intentionally added to some products, or discharged in industrial effluent. Tires are thought to be among the main sources, as are plastic beads used in personal care products. Recent research has found them to be widely accumulating across the globe – as much as 10m tons are estimated to end up in the oceans annually.

Humans and animals ingest or inhale large amounts of microplastics, which have been detected in human lungs, brains, hearts, blood, placentas, and feces. Their toxicity is still being studied, but new research that exposed mice to microplastic points to health issues, like behavioral changes, and other studies have found links to cancer and irritable bowel syndrome.

Waseda researchers gathered samples at altitudes ranging between 1,300-3,776 meters, which revealed nine types of polymers, like polyurethane, and one type of rubber. The cloud’s mist contained about 6.7 to 13.9 pieces of microplastics, and among them was a large volume of “water loving” plastic bits, which suggests the pollution “plays a key role in rapid cloud formation, which may eventually affect the overall climate”, the authors wrote in a press release.

That is potentially a problem because microplastics degrade much faster when exposed to ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere, and give off greenhouse gasses as they do. A high concentration of these microplastics in clouds in sensitive polar regions could throw off the ecological balance, the authors wrote.

The findings highlight how microplastics are highly mobile and can travel long distances through the air and environment. Previous research has found the material in rain, and the study’s authors say the main source of airborne plastics may be seaspray, or aerosols, that are released when waves crash or ocean bubbles burst. Dust kicked up by cars on roads is another potential source, the authors wrote.

Lego has stopped a project to make bricks from recycled drinks bottles instead of oil-based plastic, saying it would have led to higher carbon emissions over the product’s lifetime.

The move, first reported by the Financial Times, followed efforts by the world’s largest toymaker to research more sustainable materials, as part of a wave of companies reassessing their contribution to global emissions as the climate crisis hits.

The Danish company makes billions of Lego pieces a year, and in 2021 began researching a potential transition to recycled polyethylene terephthalate (PET) from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), which needs about 2kg of petroleum to make 1kg of plastic. ABS is used in about 80% of Lego blocks.

“It’s like trying to make a bike out of wood rather than steel,” said Tim Brooks, Lego’s head of sustainability, referring to how the non-oil-based material was softer and demanded extra ingredients for durability, as well as greater energy for processing and drying.

The “level of disruption to the manufacturing environment was such that we needed to change everything in our factories” to scale up recycled PET use, he said. “After all that, the carbon footprint would have been higher. It was disappointing.”

The company said in 2021 it had more than 150 people working on sustainability. But Lego’s chief executive, Niels Christiansen, told the FT the toymaker “tested hundreds and hundreds of materials” but could not find a “magic material” to solve sustainability issues.

Instead, Lego aims to make each part of ABS more sustainable by incorporating more bio-based and recycled material. Christiansen said the group will triple spending on sustainability to $3bn (£2.45bn) a year by 2025 while promising not to pass on higher costs to consumers.

A south-east Queensland plastics spill in which 40,000 small discs were flushed into the ocean could threaten birds and marine life for years to come, an expert says, amid criticism of CSIRO’s handling of the breach.

A CSIRO spokesperson confirmed on Thursday that 40 litres of plastics known as biomedia were accidentally discharged from the Bribie Island Research Centre on Monday afternoon, with many washing up on nearby Woorim beach.

The biomedia is about the size of an M&M, and is non-toxic and used in the filtration of water for aquaculture research, the spokesperson said. It was released accidentally into a wastewater well and discharged into the sea.

“The breach was addressed immediately to prevent the further release of biomedia and CSIRO staff have been involved in clean-up efforts on the beach.”

But Dr Shima Ziajahromi, an expert in the impact of microplastics in waterways, said the clean-up should not be limited to the beach and that the surface of the ocean should be skimmed.

• Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup

“There’s a lot that would have already transported further in the middle of the ocean because of the winds and currents,” she said.

Ziajahromi said the spill was the worst she had heard of in Queensland – and would remain a danger to animals for a long time.

“It’s very hard to clean up the ocean. Plastic can remain in the water for thousands of years,” she said.

“As plastic breaks down, they get even more harmful because they will be available to the smaller organisms that can be mistaken for food … even zooplankton can ingest them.”

Darren Jew from the Bribie Island Environmental Protection Association (Biepa) said locals had been working tirelessly to clean up the plastic as turtle nesting season approaches.

“At low tide on Tuesday, I walked about 100m [on Woorim beach] and got maybe 50 pieces,” Jew said.

“Over the summer we will have critically endangered loggerhead turtles nesting on our beaches and the migratory shorebirds that are on their way back for the summer roosting period.”

The pieces of plastic are small enough that they could be mistaken for crabs by the shorebirds or swallowed by turtles, according to Jew.

“We know that seabirds ingest a lot of plastic out in the ocean, so our concern would be they’re going to suffer a similar fate in this instance,” he said.

The Biepa president, Richard Ogden, said while it was inspiring to see up to 100 community members come together to clean the beach, they should have been informed sooner.

“I was really unhappy that it was community members who blew the whistle on this and that it was only because of people out on the beach seeing these little bits of plastic that we were alerted to it,” Ogden said.

The state MP for Pumicestone, Ali King, said she had been contacted by many locals angered by the spill.

“People are feeling really frustrated … they’ve been telling me they would like the CSIRO to be able to provide some assurances that nothing like this will happen again,” King said.

“When it comes to any plastic in the environment, people here on Bribie are very alive to the risks to wildlife and that is why they’ve found this event distressing.”

The CSIRO spokesperson said aquaculture research had been conducted at the site for 12 years without incident, and the organisation had well-established protocols in place around the environmental management of its facilities.

The organisation acted “immediately” to repair work to the pipe within an hour and took part in the clean-up, they said.

They did not confirm if CSIRO would undertake cleaning of the water surface but said it was “acting on advice on a range of mediation and clean up responses”.

“The biomedia beads are non-toxic and are a type of plastic that is highly stable and will stay intact while the clean-up is progressing,” the spokesperson said.

They said the amount of plastic released was “negligible” when compared with the polystyrene spill resulting from the Brisbane floods.

A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries (Daf) said “a range of measures will be considered by the department and CSIRO to determine the most suitable method to prevent a recurrence.”

The hills that circle Skopje keep citizens safe when smog grows thick, but they also trap the toxins that make its air among the most menacing of any city in Europe.

The mountains are the only escape, says Katarina, a 33-year-old accountant, as she walks home from an evening hike. “I was wearing a mask for air pollution before Covid.”

Dirty fuel, bad design and tricky terrain have for decades choked the capital of North Macedonia, a former Yugoslav republic of 2 million people in the middle of the Balkans. The city sits in a valley where ageing factories whirr next to homes and offices. In winter, when people stoke stoves with waste wood and rubbish, warm air rises up to meet the cold and heavy mountain air above, forming a lid that traps pollution close to the ground.

The clouds last for days if the wind does not blow. “It feels and tastes like burnt plastic,” says Dragana Gjurcinoska, a 29-year-old event manager at the Panoramika hotel at the foot of the Vodno mountain.

Skopje is home to three of the most polluted districts on the continent, a Guardian analysis based on modelling of European air quality data has revealed. Together with cities across the western Balkans and in Poland, it is one of Europe’s hotspots for particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter, known as PM2.5. Some of these fine particles slip through the lungs and into the veins, riding the bloodstream through the body and wreaking havoc on the organs they meet.

A study in 2018 found the air in Skopje was so clogged with pollutants that residents died two to three years earlier on average than they would without this “largely preventable” environmental factor.

If you convert it into economic terms, the cost to society “is very, very high”, says Mihail Kocubovski, a co-author of the study and the head of the environment team at Macedonia’s institute of public health, which pegged the social cost of Skopje’s air pollution between €0.5bn and €1.5bn. “It is much better to pay €1 [on prevention], let’s say, and to save €5 or €10 not spent on health issues like morbidity, mortality and sick days.”

By cutting PM2.5 pollution to the EU’s recommended limit micrograms per metre cubed, the researchers found, Skopje would avoid one in every five hospital trips for heart and lung disease. If it hit a stricter limit of 10 micrograms per metre cubed from the World Health Organization – which has since lowered its limit to 5 micrograms per metre cubed and declared no level of air pollution to be safe – the city would halve such hospital visits.

On the streets of Skopje, people say they fear not just for their own health, but also that of their families and friends.

“My mother has asthma, my husband has upper respiratory problems, and me as well,” says 30-year-old Sara Carikj Jakimovska, a technical adviser at a waste management consultancy and mother of a two-year-old. “The last three years my nose has been clogged all the time and I have trouble breathing.”

Angela Zdravkova, a 25-year-old medicine student who works part time in a bookshop by an intersection of two seven-lane roads, says it is common for vulnerable people to wear masks in winter. “I mostly worry for the kids and the elderly.”

For some residents, bad air is an extra reason to leave the country, along with the low wages and corruption that have fuelled a brain drain to the EU. More than 90% of young people in North Macedonia want to move abroad, a survey from the nonprofit Youth Alliance found last year. The economy is hit further because the air deters foreign workers and tourists, and keeps residents stuck at home.

From the Panoramika hotel’s sixth floor Sky Bar, Gjurcinoska says the bar’s biggest advantage is the view. But on the worst days, she says, gesturing toward the city’s terracotta roofs and rolling hills, the pollution is so bad “you cannot see Skopje at all”.

A small comfort for older residents is that the smog is now grey, not black. A few decades ago, Skopje burned even dirtier fuels that spewed sulphur dioxide. During what scientists call temperature inversions, when a layer of warm air forms a lid over the city, the sticky sulphur clung to water vapour in the air and made black smog that caked cars with a layer of soot. The city has since banned petrol that contains sulphur and swapped its district heating plants to run on gas instead of oil.

“It was terrible,” says Kocubovski, remembering the last big black smog event in January 1993. “It was very difficult to breathe, the people were suffering.”

PM2.5 pollution has also fallen slightly in recent years as warmer winters mean people need to heat less. But experts say there has been little effort to help households swap to cleaner fuels. Between a quarter and a third of people in North Macedonia cannot keep their home warm. Two-thirds of Skopje’s residents burn wood, often using low-quality fuel in inefficient stoves, with some burning rubbish when they cannot afford anything else.

Bojana Stanojevska Pecurovska, the president of the nonprofit Centre for Climate Change, says the city should extend its district heating network to all settlements, help people make their homes more energy efficient and regulate the moisture content of firewood. “It’s a social issue, and no one is dealing with it as a social issue.”

As well as heating houses cleanly, experts have called for stricter controls on factories and traffic. They have also criticised haphazard construction. When Skopje was destroyed by an earthquake in 1963, the city was rebuilt with corridors that let air flow from east to west, blowing pollutants out through the valley. But in recent decades, locals say, buildings have sprung up in places they shouldn’t, blocking crucial airways and leaving residents to choke.

From a bench at a crossroads in the industrial Aerodrom district, the 30-year-old software engineer and opposition city councillor Gorjan Jovanovski points to three white skyscrapers whose top floors poke above the smog in winter. “They’re the only ones tall enough to rise above the temperature inversion, so if you’re rich enough, you can buy your way out.”

What is harder to understand, he says, is that the children of the elites still breathe the same air when they go to school.

Jovanovski rose to prominence after developing an app to aggregate air quality data that became popular in Skopje and several other Balkan cities. But the increased citizen awareness did not translate into cleaner air, he says. In 2021, he and other disillusioned environmental activists ran for local office and won two of the 45 seats on the city council.

With air pollution, he says, “we’re all aware, we know how to track it, particularly during winter time. The problem is the awareness seems to have stopped at the gates of the government.”

The city council did not respond to a request for comment.

Still, it is not just Skopje’s problem, says Jovanoski, opening up the air quality app and pointing to other cities in the Balkans and Eastern Europe. “If you look at the map during winter, in Europe you see the iron curtain in air quality.”