You have microplastics in you. Did you know? Between checkout at a grocery store to the refrigerator of your home, single-use plastic bags are utilized for only minutes before being discarded. Once disposed of, the plastic bags will take a minimum of 20 years to decompose with some types of bags taking up to 500 years. Sitting in landfills, these plastic bags won’t fully decompose. Instead, they break down into fragments of plastic measuring less than five millimeters in length. These are what are known as microplastics.
Microplastics have often been connected to ocean pollution when larger plastics break down into small particles in the water. However, microplastics are much closer to home than you might think. In Pennsylvania, the pollution problem exists in the streams themselves. A study of 50 of Pennsylvania’s high-quality streams found microplastics in every single sample.
They are in your drinking water, food and ultimately you. In 2017, researchers found that 94% of tap water contained discernable levels of microplastics (Allen, 2021). Bottled water is not a suitable alternative with a recent global study measuring microplastic contamination across 11 different brands (Mason et al., 2018). Findings showed that 93% of the bottles had evidence of microplastics…