Bottle-fed babies consume 1.6 million microplastic particles each day: Study
According to researchers, bottle-fed babies have been consuming more than a million pieces of microplastics each day.
The researchers in Ireland found that at an average bottle-fed babies consumed 1.6 million plastic microparticles each day during the first 12 months of their lives. The research was published in the Nature Food journal.
The study looked at rate of microplastic release in ten types of baby bottles with polypropylene being the most commonly used plastic for food containers.
A research had earlier concluded that microplastics and nanoplastics have been found in humans worldwide.
According to “Plastic Oceans”, at least 300 million tonnes of plastic waste is produced worldwide every year with microplastics being 0.2 inches and nanonplastics smaller than 0.001 mm.
Researchers have found that exposure to high water temperatures has had the biggest effect on microplastic release, going from 0.6 million particles per litre on an average at 25C to 55 million/litre at 95C.
According to the researchers, babies in developed countries were reportedly taking the most plastic with 2.3 million particles daily in North America and 2.6 million in Europe which it attributed to low breast-feeding rates in richer countries.
The study had taken World Health Organization(WHO) guidelines on sterilisation as the basis of the study. The researchers said that proper studies on microplastic impact on human health needs to be carried out further.
