Plastics found in your poo

IN THE next 60 seconds, people around the world will buy 1 million plastic bottles and 2 million plastic bags. By the end of the year, we will produce enough bubble wrap to encircle the equator 10 times.

Though it will take more than 1 000 years for most of these items to degrade, many will soon break apart into tiny shards known as microplastics, trillions of which have been showing up in the oceans, fish, tap water and even table salt.

Now, we can add one more microplastic repository to the list: the human gut.

Researchers looked for microplastics in stool samples of eight people from Finland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the UK and Austria. Every single sample tested positive for the presence of a variety of microplastics.

“This is the first study of its kind, so we did a pilot trial to see if there are any microplastics detectable,” said Philipp Schwabl, a gastroenterologist at the Medical University of Vienna and lead author of the study. “The results were astonishing.”

There are no certain health implications for their findings.

“Most participants drank liquids from plastic bottles, but also fish and seafood ingestion was common,” he said. “It is highly likely that food is being contaminated with plastics during various steps of food processing or as a result of packaging.”