Australians ingest a credit card’s worth of plastic a week – so what’s it doing to us?
Posted on February 23, 2022 by DrRossH in Plastic Waste NewsColloquially known as Ausmap, the citizen science project has collected more than 3.5m pieces of microplastic from more than 300 beaches around the country, ranging from Thursday Island in the north to Bruny Island, off Tasmania’s south-east coast.
Volunteers collect plastics between 1mm and 5mm in length; pellets, fibres and fragments are meticulously sorted and documented. “That’s what we can see easily in our sieves,” Ausmap’s program director, Dr Michelle Blewit, says.
“Microplastic doesn’t always refer to things that are microscopic,” she says. “Obviously it breaks up further and further … the smaller it gets, then there’s more chance of it being ingested by animals.”
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