WESTERN NEW YORK – Here’s something tough to swallow, people are ingesting five-grams of plastic every week.
According to a new study by the University of Newcastle in Australia, people around the world ingest an average of around two-thousand microplastic particles a week.
Microplastics are particles smaller than five millimeters. Researchers say they’re making their way into our food, drinking water and even the air.
The largest source of plastic ingestion? Drinking water.
The world wildlife fund spearheaded the research for its report “no plastic in nature: assessing plastic ingestion from nature to people.”
A separate study this month found that Americans eat, drink and breathe as many as 121-thousand microplastic particles each year.
The researchers note that their study “builds on a limited set of evidence, and comes with limitations,” including a “lack of data available on crucial metrics, such as weight and size distribution of microplastics in natural environments.”
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