Estimation of the mass of microplastics ingested - A pivotal first step towards human health risk assessment.
By Kala Senathirajah, S. Attwood, G. Bhagwat, M. Carbery, S. Wilson, Thavamani Palanisami. Journal of Hazardous Materials, 2020
905 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The ubiquitous presence of microplastics in the food web has been established. However, the mass of microplastics exposure to humans is not defined, impeding the human health risk assessment. Our objectives were to extract the data from the available evidence on the number and mass of microplastics from various sources, to determine the uncertainties in the existing data, to set future research directions, and derive a global average rate of microplastic ingestion to assist in the development of human health risk assessments and effective management and policy options. To enable the comparison of microplastics exposure across a range of sources, data extraction and standardization was coupled with the adoption of conservative assumptions. Following the analysis of data from fifty-nine publications, an average mass for individual microplastics in the 0-1 mm size range was calculated. Subsequently, we estimated that globally on average, humans may ingest 0.1-5 g of microplastics weekly through various exposure pathways. This was the first attempt to transform microplastic counts into a mass value relevant to human toxicology. The determination of an ingestion rate is fundamental to assess the human health risks of microplastic ingestion. These findings will contribute to future human health risk assessment frameworks.
Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0eb0e14e9b93d48b43a2488fabf0b2441f6d14fe
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Citations in the corpus
- Raman Microspectroscopy Detection and Characterisation of Microplastics in Human Breastmilk (2022, background): “In fact, numerous food-related sources of MPs have been reported, including fish, shellfish, and human essential daily consumables, such as table salt, sugar, bottled water, milk, honey, plastic teabags, and to a greater extent, plastic kitchen tools, plates, and packaging [53].”