You're Probably Eating Plastic For Dinner, You Just Don't Know It Yet
This story is part of a series on ocean plastics .
The oceans are teeming with plastic trash: shopping bags, water bottles, old toothbrushes, and much more. By 2020, there will be more plastic than fish in marine waters.
Over time, this debris begins to break into near-microscopic particles. There may be 51 trillion tiny plastic pieces scattered across the world's oceans ― 500 times more than there are stars in the galaxy. Fish, unable to discern what's plastic and what's food, are eating this stuff. And humans, ever ravenous, eat fish ― lots of them .
One in four fish has plastic in its gut, according a recent study. Plastic particles have also been found in oysters and mussels . If you eat a lot of shellfish, for example, you might be consuming 11,000 pieces of plastic a year . The health effects of this are unknown .
Sources: NOAA( 1 )( 2 ), NRDC , Columbia Earth Institute , EPA , Seeker , PLOS ONE , UN , University of California , NCBI , The Guardian .
