Author: Elizabeth Claire Alberts
New research suggests that plastic recycling facilities could be releasing wastewater packed with billions of tiny plastic particles, contributing to the pollution of waterways and endangering human health. A team of international scientists sampled water inside a new recycling facility at an undisclosed location in the U.K. They suggest that the facility could be releasing up to 75 billion microplastics — tiny plastic pieces less than 5 millimeters, or 3/16 of an inch, in length — per cubic meter of wastewater per year. That’s about 6% of the plastic that entered the facility to be recycled. However, the researchers only considered microplastics as small as 1.6 microns (μm), which means these numbers are likely to be an underestimate, they say.