You May Be Eating As Much Plastic As Your Credit Card Each Week, And Up To 250 Gram Per Year

Humans put an estimated 8 trillion kilograms of plastic into the oceans each year. We're not even close to getting all of that back out later, and it obviously doesn't decompose.

So it might come as no surprise that we end up eating a bunch of that plastic later.

New research has emerged that combines the results of more than 50 global studies over the past few years. It suggests that we could be ingesting about 5 grams of plastic each week, from the air we breathe, food we eat, and water we drink.

Yeah, you're unknowingly doing the equivalent of chowing down on a credit card once a week.

That amounts to about 250g of plastic entering your system each year.

"These findings must serve as a wake-up call to governments. If we don't want plastic in our bodies, we need to stop the millions of tonnes of plastic that continue leaking into nature every year," said WWF International Director General Marco Lambertini. WWF commissioned the study, that was carried out by the University of Newcastle.

In order to fix this problem, Lambertini insists that we need global treaties to target plastic pollution, that involve cooperation from governments and businesses, as well as the consumer level.

And yet, despite how high that plastic content is, WWF says it may actually be an underestimate. That's because there haven't yet been any studies conducted on how much microplastic contamination is in staple foods like milk, rice, wheat, corn, bread, pasta and oils.

The biggest source of this toxin though was from drinking water. It didn't matter whether it came from groundwells, surface water, taps, or bottles. That's because plastic doesn't decompose, but it does break down into microscopic particles as small as less than 5mm.

Another major source of plastic we're ingesting came from shellfish, responsible for as much as 0.5g a week. That's because, while fish are usually gutted and cleaned, shellfish are eaten whole. That means we're putting shellfish with their digestive systems, processing a lifetime of microplastics, into our bellies.

And you're really sitting there wondering if your back pain is your biggest health concern.