I write many awareness articles on microplastics and how they harm our ecosystem. One of the biggest concerns is that it is now in our food and we are eating microplastics without our knowledge and it happens almost every day based on the food we consume. In some countries where plastic pollution is high, this contamination is also very high. In general, this can happen to anyone anywhere because our food sources are coming from several places across the world and we are importing our food from many places and even the places that has contaminations.
We have to first understand what microplastics are. The plastic particles when mixed with garbage get dumped in landfills or they get added to water bodies. The problem with plastics is that they don't decompose but they still break down to microplastics. The microplastics are less than 5 mm in size and some can even go into the size of nanoparticles and they mix with almost everything. There are even research works going on that provides more information on some of the unknown diseases we are having including cancers. Some things are hard to prove and some things are still under research. But we know for a fact that Microplastics are very harmful to our environment.
Seafood is very common in many countries. Some food comes from self-grown farms and some foods come from oceans. Due to the contamination we have in our water bodies, the seafood may also contain microplastics. The sea creatures consume plastics by mistake and for some sea creatures, the microplastics enter into their body even without their knowledge. This way they end up having a lot of microplastics in their body. Only when we cut open a fish or other sea creature, we can find lots of microplastics.
There is a high chance that if we eat such contaminated food, these microplastics also enter our bodies and cause problems. There are a few measures we can take to prevent this from happening and the first preventive measure is to reduce the usage of plastics and make sure we dispose of our plastic waste properly. The government should also take proper measures to make sure the plastics are disposed of properly. Sometimes the seafood we consume can have microplastics that accumulate in their body over time. It may not happen in a single day but gradually it can be there.
We can do a few things to be safe from these contaminations. We can choose bigger fish as they tend to have low levels of microplastics compared to the smaller fish. Some fish and other varieties are coming from places where contamination is very minimal. We can choose such food and reduce the impact on our body.
We can also maybe use plastics that are not one time use but recycling is a big problem everywhere and everything still goes to the landfill and from there, it becomes contaminated. We still don't know yet if the clouds also carry microplastics when they evaporate from rivers and oceans. Other than that by all other means microplastic contamination is continuously happening.
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