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Microplastic contamination of table salts from Taiwan, including a global review
Plastic pollution is a rapidly worsening environmental problem, especially in oceanic habitats. Environmental pollution with microplastic particles is also causing food consumed by humans to be increasingly polluted, including table salts. Therefore, we present the first study which focuses only on...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Nature Publishing Group UK
2019
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6626012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31300670 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-46417-z |
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author | Lee, Hyemi Kunz, Alexander Shim, Won Joon Walther, Bruno A. |
author_facet | Lee, Hyemi Kunz, Alexander Shim, Won Joon Walther, Bruno A. |
author_sort | Lee, Hyemi |
collection | PubMed |
description | Plastic pollution is a rapidly worsening environmental problem, especially in oceanic habitats. Environmental pollution with microplastic particles is also causing food consumed by humans to be increasingly polluted, including table salts. Therefore, we present the first study which focuses only on table salt products purchased in Taiwan which we examined for the presence of microplastics. We used Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to identify the polymer type of each particle. Within 4.4 kg of salt, we detected 43 microplastic particles which averages to 9.77 microplastic particles/kg. The identified polymer types were, in descending abundance, polypropylene, polyethylene, polystyrene, polyester, polyetherimide, polyethylene terephthalate, and polyoxymethylene. We combined our novel results with those of previous studies to provide the first global review of microplastic contamination of table salts. We found that 94% of salt products tested worldwide contained microplastics, with 3 out of 27 polymer types (polyethylene terephthalate, polypropylene, polyethylene) accounting for the majority of all particles. Averaging over seven separate studies, table salts contain a mean of 140.2 microplastic particles/kg. With a mean annual salt consumption of ~3.75 kg/year, humans therefore annually ingest several hundred microplastic particles from salt alone. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6626012 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | Nature Publishing Group UK |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-66260122019-07-21 Microplastic contamination of table salts from Taiwan, including a global review Lee, Hyemi Kunz, Alexander Shim, Won Joon Walther, Bruno A. Sci Rep Article Plastic pollution is a rapidly worsening environmental problem, especially in oceanic habitats. Environmental pollution with microplastic particles is also causing food consumed by humans to be increasingly polluted, including table salts. Therefore, we present the first study which focuses only on table salt products purchased in Taiwan which we examined for the presence of microplastics. We used Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy to identify the polymer type of each particle. Within 4.4 kg of salt, we detected 43 microplastic particles which averages to 9.77 microplastic particles/kg. The identified polymer types were, in descending abundance, polypropylene, polyethylene, polystyrene, polyester, polyetherimide, polyethylene terephthalate, and polyoxymethylene. We combined our novel results with those of previous studies to provide the first global review of microplastic contamination of table salts. We found that 94% of salt products tested worldwide contained microplastics, with 3 out of 27 polymer types (polyethylene terephthalate, polypropylene, polyethylene) accounting for the majority of all particles. Averaging over seven separate studies, table salts contain a mean of 140.2 microplastic particles/kg. With a mean annual salt consumption of ~3.75 kg/year, humans therefore annually ingest several hundred microplastic particles from salt alone. Nature Publishing Group UK 2019-07-12 /pmc/articles/PMC6626012/ /pubmed/31300670 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-46417-z Text en © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
spellingShingle | Article Lee, Hyemi Kunz, Alexander Shim, Won Joon Walther, Bruno A. Microplastic contamination of table salts from Taiwan, including a global review |
title | Microplastic contamination of table salts from Taiwan, including a global review |
title_full | Microplastic contamination of table salts from Taiwan, including a global review |
title_fullStr | Microplastic contamination of table salts from Taiwan, including a global review |
title_full_unstemmed | Microplastic contamination of table salts from Taiwan, including a global review |
title_short | Microplastic contamination of table salts from Taiwan, including a global review |
title_sort | microplastic contamination of table salts from taiwan, including a global review |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6626012/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31300670 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-46417-z |
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