A true daily "indigestion" of plastic with more than 100 tiny particles of that material is ingested in each meal.
From the house´s furniture to the synthetic fabrics, the tiny particles of plastic end up in the domestic dust and, with these, "finish trip" on our dishes.
This is what emerges in the research published in the journal Environmental Pollution carried out by the Heriot-Watt University of Edinburgh.
The surprising discovery occurred in a simple way: the scholars placed in the Petri dishes (the typical glass palms used in laboratories for cell culture) near the dishes in which meals were consumed in three homes. Special "traps" of dust inside the dishes that allowed counting up to 14 tiny fragments of plastic (microplastics) at the end of a 20- minute meal, the equivalent of 114 plastic fibers on a larger dish.
This means that within a year in the stomach of each individual they can unknowingly finish up to 68,415 potentially dangerous plastic fibers.
Coordinated by Ted Henry, the research group could then compare the plastic fibers with those that are deposited on the dishes.
It emerged that in each mollusk there are about two fragments of plastic that can come from the sea environment: an amount that, based on British consumption, is comparable to more than 100 microplastics ingested in a year. Now the challenge is to understand where the micro-plastics that end up in the dishes come with the dust. According to the researchers, they are likely to come from the same house or from the immediate external environment, while excluding them from arriving with food.
Translation: Ilia Charon