New Research in the Netherlands: synthetic clothing fibers inhibit the production of lung cells
Nylon and polyester hinder the growth and recovery of our airways, scientists from the University of Groningen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), TNO, […]
Amsterdam, 27 March 2019 – Animals living in the deepest place of the world ingested plastic. The seafloor of the Mariana Trench, between Japan and the Philippines, lies almost eleven kilometres below the surface of the sea. Last year researchers found a plastic bag in the Mariana Trench. And the concentration of plastic particles was the highest, with 335 particles of mainly single-use plastics per square kilometre, at a depth of six kilometres.
And now, there has been another shocking discovery. In the deeps of the Mariana Trench lives a species of amphipods (Lysianassoidea amphipod) and marine biologists of Newcastle University, who study marine life in the trenches of the Pacific Ocean, wondered if plastic would be present in these amphipods. The researchers sampled 90 amphipods from the MarianaTrench and five other oceanic trenches.
The result is shocking: 72% of the amphipods contained at least one particle of plastic. In the MarianaTrench all the amphipods contained plastic. And 84% of the microplastic fibers originated from synthetic clothing while 16% originated from other microplastics. In the least contaminated trench, the New Hebrides Trench, still half of the sampled amphipods contained plastic. The largest fiber was a few millimetres long, purple, twisted in the shape of an eight, and found in an amphipod barely a few centimetres tall.
This Newcastle University study is the first time proof that even animals living in the deepest locations on Earth ingest microplastics.
Nylon and polyester hinder the growth and recovery of our airways, scientists from the University of Groningen (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen), TNO, […]
European countries are part of the plastic pollution problem in South East Asian countries because shady dealers are free to do what they like. This was yet again the finding of a recent broadcast by Pointer in cooperation with investigative journalists (in Dutch).
By 2025, Dutch supermarkets promise to use 20% less plastic packaging material than in 2017. According to this promise, by 2021 we would be at around 10%.
Today marks the tenth anniversary of Maria Westerbos’ founding of the Plastic Soup Foundation at her kitchen table. Plastic soup, pollution of the environment by plastic, was hardly known at the time. One of her first goals was that everyone in the Netherlands should know what it was.