It's estimated that humans dump an average of 8 trillion kilograms of plastic into the oceans every year. That's a lot of pollutant that doesn't break down.
Instead, it just breaks apart into tiny "microplastics" that go pretty much everywhere, including into humans.
Images courtesy: NOAA
At the United European Gastroenterology meeting in Vienna this week, a group of researchers revealed a startling truth. We might have already known how we ingest these microplastics whenever we eat fish that have consumed it and so one. However, these scientists actually found a horrifying amount of plastic buildup in human feces.
The study was conducted by researchers from the Environment Agency Austria and the Medical University of Vienna. In it, they studied the stool samples of eight participants from all over the world, including Japan, Italy, Russia, Poland, the UK, Finland, Austria, and the Netherlands.
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Throughout the prolonged study, the volunteers recorded exactly what they ate in the week prior to the stool sampling, including how the items were packaged. Specifically, they were told to eat plastic-wrapped foods and drink from plastic bottles.
These are extremely small pieces of plastic, less than a millimetre in size, and they were found in the subjects' leavings. Think about how horrifying that is for a moment. You probably also eat and drink a lot of stuff packed in plastic, which means your poop could be full of plastic too. More so if you eat a lot of fish in your diet. And because these particles are so small, you'd never know without special equipment.
If that wasn't bad enough, the scientists recorded NINE different types of plastic in the stool samples! Not only do these make your immune system and your stomach weaker, they can also transmit toxic chemicals and pathogens into the body.
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According to National Geographic, almost half of all the plastic ever made has been manufactured in just the 21st century, which shows how much we use the awful stuff. Unfortunately, only about 20 percent of that is recycled, even as people across the world continue to buy an average of close to 1 million plastic bottles per minute.
While other studies have documented microplastics before, this will be the first time it's been proven to accumulate in humans to this extent. The worst part is, we still don't know exactly how it affects us. So continuing to ignore something that could potentially be killing us seems like a not very smart thing to do.