People Ingest Five Grams Of Plastic Each Week, Study Finds

A study found that people ingest five grams of small plastic particles a week, which is about the size of a single credit card, reports Fréttablaðið.

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“These figures are based … on the amount of plastic that is known to be floating in the air,” says Sophie Jensen, a chemical analysis specialist at the research institute Matís.

But the polluters, humans themselves, who dump as much as one truckload of plastic into the ocean per second, are not spared from all this plastic pollution.

“Repeated measurements show,” says Sophie, “that the plastic and its toxins are all found everywhere. It is found in the ice in Greenland and the deepest rifts in the high seas.”

These are called nanoparticles, which are so small that it is difficult to see them with the naked eye. “If you’re wearing a fleece sweater, you’ll breathe them in endlessly,” says Sophie.

She says these particles are so small that can enter the bloodstream. “And it goes without saying that these small particles have now also been found in amniotic fluid and the placenta,” says Sophie.