“There’s no escaping them no matter what you eat, it seems.”

It isn’t just seafood that’s loaded with microplastic pollution. In a new study, scientists found microplastics in nearly 90 of sampled meats and meat-like alternatives – including seafood, chicken breasts, beef steaks, tofu, and plant-based burgers.

It’s become well-documented that seafood is often tainted with the presence of microplastics due to the shockingly high quantities of plastic in the planet’s oceans. For instance, a 2017 review found that regular eaters of fish and shellfish could be ingesting up to 11,000 microparticles a year.

However, until now, there’s been relatively little research into the prevalence of plastic in terrestrial protein sources, like beef and chicken.

To pry into the issue, scientists at Ocean Conservancy and the University of Toronto sampled 16 protein types, including highly processed protein products and minimally processed “fresh” products.

  • Gigan@lemmy.world
    941·
    10 months ago

    Single-use plastics should have been banned 10-15 years ago and we should be phasing out the rest of them now.

      • Anamnesis@lemmy.world
        7·
        10 months ago

        How dangerous are they? I see lots of articles about them being in everything but not much about what they actually do when they get inside you.

      • andros_rex@lemmy.world
        2·
        10 months ago

        That’s why “recycling” is so popular I think. The industry knew that there would be pushes against plastic, and came up with an ingenious way to make you the one “responsible” while also selling you the fairy tale that we could just reuse the stuff forever. People feel good about themselves for putting stuff in the blue bin, without realizing the near certainty that it’s going to end up in the landfill too.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
        22·
        10 months ago

        It’s not a question of convenience. Plastics require several magnitudes less energy to produce goods than alternatives like metal, glass and wood. If we stop using plastics today our emissions will sky rocket so high the planet will start boiling.

        We need to force governments to recycle better, because a lot of plastics are completely ignored in many countries.

        Here’s a quick example. My hobby is 3D printing and I live in the UK. The most common plastic in this hobby is PLA. It is both sustainable and recyclable. But Britain doesn’t recycle it as part of household waste. There are companies here which offer PLA recycling, but they require at least 50L worth of PLA to pick it up from you. I use about 5kg per year, so even if I throw away everything I print, I will need 10 years to fill the recycling order. But since I only want to throw away failed attempts, it will take a lifetime to fill it.

        If my council would start using hot composters instead of cold ones I could at least throw my PLA waste into compost with food and it would decrease into lactic acid, but the government doesn’t give a shit, so all my plastic goes into landfill.

    • rowrowrowyourboat@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      10 months ago

      Nearly half (44 percent) of the identified microplastics were fibers, while a third (30 percent) were plastic fragments. This is in tune with other studies that have shown plastic fibers from clothes and other textile products are the most prevalent form of microplastic in the environment.

      More important than single-use plastics seems to be synthetic clothing.

      • Aux@lemmy.world
        01·
        10 months ago

        Quality synthetic clothing is actually great. You can wear the same t-shirt 10 years in a row and it will look and feel like a new one. But cheap ones tend to fall apart faster than cotton variants.

  • Someology@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    10 months ago

    I keep hearing George Carlin’s old comedy routine about how we evolved because Mother Earth needed plastic for reasons, and now that we’ve made enough to last a very long time, she can get rid of us…

  • Sagrotan@lemmy.world
    28·
    10 months ago

    For years, we got our farmers and hunters where we get our meat, search on your vicinity, it’s not only better, it’s cheaper in the long run. You’ll notice that you’ll eat less meat, but better one. Stop the supermarket overlords.

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
    613·
    10 months ago

    They should compare meat from cans, from plastic bags and fresh meat…get a live chicken and stab it a few times with a sample core auger. Right? How could we beat torture the animals before we eat them? Grinding them up using plastic bushings makes plastic particles, grinding them using stones makes stone particles. Finally grinding them using carbides and metals leaves carbide and metal particles!

    We chew… maybe our methods of animal torture should include calcium carbonate tools, smashers, mushers, cutters, grinders, etc? All particles would then be made of stuff that is good for us.