Plastic: The Unseen Truth - Tonight
A recent report claims, without knowing it, we may be ingesting 2,000 tiny pieces of plastic every week - and could have serious health implications.
It is estimated that more than 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced since the early 1950s and around 60% of that plastic has ended up in either a landfill or the natural environment. However, there is a hidden issue: microplastics. A recent report from WWF claims that we ingest a coat hanger worth of plastic a month, and that could have serious health implications.
Environmental journalist Lucy Siegle investigates if plastics and the additives used to make them have an impact on our health. Firstly Lucy provides a urine sample to Annelies Den Boer, Chairperson of the Tegengif Foundation to discover if she has any of the potentially harmful chemicals in her body.
The results were shocking.
Phthalates and bisphenol A (BPA) chemicals can be found in all sorts of everyday items such as cosmetics, personal care products like shampoo bottles, vinyl flooring and even food packaging. Annalise explained to Lucy that we are all exposed to these potentially harmful chemicals every day.
We contacted the Food Standards Agency who are responsible for monitoring the possible dangers of BPA, Phthalates and microplastics in food and Public Health England they told the programme:
The harm caused to sea life because of single-use plastics ending up clogging the oceans is well documented. But what about the unseen microplastics? A team from the Department of Geography at The University of Manchester has been studying the main supplier of microplastics in the oceans and found river systems are one of the main vectors for seafood contamination. It is commonly known that rivers in southeast Asia are heavily polluted with microplastics but, the River Tame showed surprising results.
Understanding how plastic might affect us all is a new science, in Amsterdam, a group of scientists shared their research results so far at the first world summit in Amsterdam on Plastics and the links with our health.
These tests could show that microplastics may be harmful to our immune cells, but more research is needed to understand if what happens in a culture dish, happens in a living human being.
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