Think about how soft plastic is. How easily a plastic surface can be scratched. How easily it can be chafed. How quickly plastic goggles become opaque from use. How much synthetic lint forms in your belly button from clothes.

Every time a plastic surface is scratched or chafed, or rubs against a rough surface, near invisible plastic dust particles break off and disperse into the environment. You breathe them into your lungs, they settle onto your food and drink and enter your stomach.

Some of them get permanently wedged inside your body. Now imagine a big, unshapely sculpture the size of a chair appears inside your house and you can't get it out for some reason. Sure, your world doesn't end, but it takes up space. How many would have to accumulate until they really started hindering your daily routines? That's what your cells feel like.

Most bubble gum is plastic for fuck's sake. People chew on plastic on a daily basis. (Good news is plastic-free chewing gum have appeared on the market.)

You don't ever have that moment when you're drinking from a bottle and you realise you've bitten off the neck of the bottle?

Microplastics are very small. Most likely to be in another thing you're eating (in an organ of an animal for example) than being visible in a sauce or something.

The answer here is even in the article title. Microplastics. Nobody is talking about chunks of plastic you can see, or feel, directly.

Looking at the study: https://d2ouvy59p0dg6k.cloudfront.net/downloads/plastic_inge... their overall estimate includes 10x the plastic from drinking water that I am likely to be getting from their statements about the water I drink. Drinking water is their #1 contributor.

(I drink US tap water, so ~20 fibers a day, 140 fibers a week, based on that vs 1769 fibers a week based on their stated typical drinking water consumption. There's of course the potential that my water has less fibers than the US average, in which case my consumption of fibers from that source would be lower again.)

So the link is scrubbing the soft language used in the study report "as much as" or "could be" and turning it into an unqualified average globally people ingest an average of 5g of plastic every week.

They are very small [1]. Also you are unlikely to notice, say, a plastic fiber in bread.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/05/people-e...

Microplastics include any fragment of plastic less than 5mm in length, and nanoplastics (less than 100nm) are much smaller than would be visibly noticeable.

Plastic doesn't decay it just gets smaller.