An average person consumes 50,000 particles of microplastic every year!

The shocking truth has been established that the average person consumes around 50,000 particles of microplastics every year! If that weren’t bad enough we also breathe in a similar amount from the air!

These startling conclusions have been announced after the first study to estimate the amount humans ingest has been published. The study makes for gloomy reading as it states that this is an underestimate as they only studied a small proportion of food and drinks for the study. They also highlighted that drinking a lot of bottled water drastically increased the number of particles consumed.

At present there is no definite proof either way to the health side effects of consuming this much micro-plastics, but scientists fear that when pieces are small enough to penetrate human tissues it could trigger immune system reactions. The results of the study were published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology and took the results of 26 previous studies to compile their data.