Over 100 tiny plastic fibres present in every meal: study

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Over 100 tiny plastic fibres present in every meal: study

Context

A study conducted by scientists from Heriot-Watt University

What they did?

They put petri dishes containing sticky dust traps on the table next to dinner plates in three homes

What did they find?

Up to 14 bits of plastic were found in the petri dishes at the end of a 20-minute meal — the equivalent of 114 plastic fibers falling on the average dinner plate given their much larger size

Source of the particles

The plastic fibers found in the home-cooked meals did not come from the food or the cooking environment, but from household dust

Conclusions

The average person swallows up to 68,415 potentially dangerous plastic fibers a year simply through sitting down to eat

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