Biodiversity reporter unveils strategy for ‘scrollytelling’ feature on microplastics

On July 28, The Guardian published a digital "scrollytelling" feature about how microplastics move through terrestrial ecosystems and into animals and people, affecting our health in complicated and only partially understood ways. The article's subject matter stood out to me because it pulled together many disparate fields of study into a coherent narrative, following a thread of microplastics through an ecosystem.

The design of the piece reinforced this narrative by illustrating how fiber travels from one place to another as the narrative unfolds. I sat down with Phoebe Weston, who led the project and is also the biodiversity reporter for The Guardian, to discuss how she, along with commissioning editor Tess McClure and artist Clair Harrup, broached the complex topic of microplastics.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Health journalists often struggle to cover topics about pervasive pollutants such as microplastics. It's challenging to determine how microplastics are impacting us individually. What's your take on this?

I try not to inundate readers with issues that we read a lot about. We know plastics are everywhere, for example. We're reading about it all the time. You can see it with your own eyes.

For this article, we wanted to go down that well-trodden path in a new way and think about how we can convey this story to readers so that they think about it differently. So, we track a single bit of plastic through ecosystems and eventually into the human food chain by following that single thread. We felt that was a powerful way to tell a story that people kind of know but hadn't seen presented in this way before.

The other thing we liked about this telling of the story is that often, when we think about plastic, we focus on marine plastic. So again, we liked this approach because it was about terrestrial ecosystems, and I think there was information that readers wouldn't have been aware of. For example, plastic may be spread on agricultural fields as sewage sludge, and that gets into crops and earthworms and then into thrushes or hedgehogs.

The design is so unique and eye-catching. How did the presentation of the article come together?

We wanted to present the story as moving up these layers of the ecosystem, kind of moving up trophic levels. We may think about nutrients moving up through the food system, but not usually plastic. But plastic contaminates different levels of the food chain, and so, we liked this idea of scrolling down and starting with a single thread, then going into the soil, the worms.

You're kind of working your way up as you scroll down the article. The little plastic thread, which is based on a bit of polyester, visually moves down the words and images. As you scroll down, the images change from being colorful into weird pink and grey, so you've got this sense of contamination happening, again, which mirrors the words and perhaps adds to the impact of what you're reading. It's a small story, but you can imagine it's being repeated, like, globally.

We all wash acrylic jumpers in the washing machine. It brings it home. It's a problem that we're all part of through our everyday activities. We wanted to raise awareness that a single bit of plastic from a jumper that you may have worn 30 times or something will last in the natural environment for hundreds of years. I love the fact that it comes back to the individual in a domestic setting,

Telling the story of a single thread is a really great way to personalize this issue, which often feels so impersonal. These huge, global problems are often told in abstract ways. Figuring out how to personalize them is difficult because much of the research presents statistics across populations. How did you research this topic and bring in the science part of the story?

What originally inspired us to do this piece was a bit of research in The Conversation by a Sussex University researcher named Emily Thrift. She looked at plastics in wild hedgehogs and how these materials move through the soil ecosystem. And then we had a discussion as a team as to how we could expand on that concept.

So we thought, well, one option is to cover that study that she did, or we could be a bit more ambitious and think about the bigger picture, drawing in lots of other research about how plastic moves through terrestrial ecosystems. Instead of telling that small image of just the soil, we then made it a much bigger story.

There is an abundance of fascinating research. It wasn't hard to find studies that looked at this issue. I was actually quite surprised. I think this article promotes research that people maybe wouldn't have read otherwise, and hopefully makes it more digestible. It wrapped up dozens of studies into one story, rather than just focusing on one study. There are dozens of studies saying the same thing, and we've kind of woven them into this single piece.

Yeah, I mean, many of the studies alone are small. I probably wouldn't report on most of them in a short-form news article format that covers a new research article. But together, they tell a story, and they start having more of an argument, when you're seeing that whole literature. And so, a piece like this can pull together those smaller studies that tend to not get as much attention, but still are important and telling something collectively.

Each of these studies gives us a tiny slice of what's happening. But when you put them all together, it's pretty compelling.