How much plastic is in your Christmas dinner?
The traditional roast Christmas dinner could have nearly a quarter of a million pieces of microplastic in it, according to researchers at the University of Portsmouth.
Do you know how much plastic is really in your Christmas dinner?
Researchers in England tried to find out
by cooking two different roast chicken dinners.
One with all the ingredients wrapped in plastic packaging
and the other with no plastic packaging at all.
‘’We found seven times more microplastics in the wrapped dinner than the non-wrapped dinner.”
Dr Fay Couceiro is an environmental pollution researcher at the University of Portsmouth.
“So we found about 55,000 particles in the non-wrapped dinner and about 230,000 in the wrapped dinner.’’
She says eating a similar plastic packaged meal every day for a year, would see you consume approximately 10 grammes of plastic.
''That’s equivalent to two plastic bags a year.''
Couceiro also says food is usually analyzed raw for microplastics under laboratory conditions
but this study looked at what was actually on your plate after the food had been cooked in a normal kitchen.
“Unfortunately there's no such thing as microplastic-free food now I think. That's because there's so many microplastics in the air and in the soil. So as we're speaking now there are likely to be some microplastics that are falling on here, onto the food that we'll be eating.’’
Global plastic production is projected to double within 20 years,
while the amount of plastic waste flowing into the world's oceans is forecast to triple in the same period.
Couceiro says there are actually higher concentrations of microplastics in our soils than in our oceans.
“I have heard people say ‘I don't have to worry about microplastics. I don't eat fish’ and that always worries me slightly that there's that misunderstanding, that disconnect. Microplastics are everywhere. If you're eating anything and drinking anything, you will be ingesting a certain number of microplastics.”
Microplastics have been found in our blood, gut and various organs…
but experts have not yet been able to say what, if any, harm it is doing to us.
“We don’t want to scare people with this. There are microplastics everywhere and we don’t know what the impacts are on human health but it’s a sensible suggestion to try to reduce them as much as possible to avert any possible negative impacts going forward. There are simple ways, as you can see from this study, we can reduce the types of plastic we have in our packaging and we can start to think about it going forward in the farming community about how we reduce the amount of plastic there too.”
