The new study reveals people could be ingesting the equivalent of a credit card each and every week.
The level of plastic pollution has become so rampant that 72.2% of water sources around Europe have plastic fibres present, and around 3.8 of those fibres of plastic are found in every litre of water.
Things are worse still for those in the United States, where 9.6 fibres were found in every litre of water, and almost 95% of all water sources had those plastic fibres present.
This is according to a new study by Australia’s University Of Newcastle, commissioned by the environmental charity WWF International, which discovered that people could be ingesting up to five grams of plastic each and every week.
The report stated that each person could be consuming over 1,750 fibres of plastic every week.
“Since 2000, the world has produced as much plastic as all the preceding years combined, a third of which is leaked into nature,” the report read.
However, water is not the only source of the plastic ingestion, with beer and salt also found to contain tiny traces, while shellfish are another major source, as they consume the plastic, and they are then in turn consumed whole.
Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, spoke of the fact that, on average, people are ingesting 250 grams (approximately nine ounces) of plastic each and every year:
“Not only are plastics polluting our oceans and waterways and killing marine life, it’s in all of us. If we don’t want it in our bodies, we need to stop the millions of tons of plastic that continue leaking into nature every year.”
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