NEW YORK—A new study reveals people eat the rough equivalent of a credit card’s worth of plastic every week.
The report from the World Wildlife Fund shows people are unwittingly eating and breathing plastic in via microplastics, tiny amounts of the substance that shed off of everyday objects.
“Scientists actually who were taking samples of dirt from national parks in the US to look for other things like wildfire residue were surprised to find that every sample of dirt they took had tiny plastic particles,” Allison Cobb, the author of “Plastic: An Autobiography” told CNN.
For example, Americans think of national parks as being very pristine places. However, scientists have found tiny plastic particles everywhere on earth, in the Arctic where there really aren’t people. These tiny particles are being carried all over the earth, CNN said.
“What it does take is everyone, every company, every government, every individual putting in the effort to make it happen,” said Winnie Lau, who works on the reduction of plastic for the Pew Charitable Trust. “And no one can sit on the sidelines, no one can say someone else will do it. If we all actually band together, come together and put in place the solutions, we can solve this within the generation.”