[Special Article] Everything About Plastic and Our Choice for Tomorrow 5. Invisible Threat, Microplastics
Other than rice, bread, and water, what do you think we intake every day? According to the report released by New Castle University in 2019, we eat plastic that is equivalent to a credit card per week. Plastics produced in 2015 were 320 million tons and 146 million tons of them, accounting for 42%, were used for packaging which mostly ended up in the environment as microplastics. Researchers are warning that these can be a greater threat to the ecosystem than the waste that is easily spotted with our bare eyes. How are the microplastics generated and why should we be alert? We will check the definition of microplastics and their hazardousness and how we should act. What are microplastics? Microplastics are a term for solid plastic particles with functional additives in a size of 100nm – 5 mm and the term was first used by Dr. Richard Thompson in 2004. Depending on how they are produced, microplastics are categorized into primary plastics and secondary plastics. Primary mi...