Plastic Contaminates Table Salt in China
Reflection/Next Steps?After reading this article, I became very concerned about all of the other potential hazards that I am putting in my body. Too much salt is can already be bad for an individual but now adding the fact that researchers are now starting to find plastic within table salt makes this even more of a potential health hazard. After learning the different information in my APES class, I am not that surprised that the most contaminated form of table salt is from the ocean. Watching all of the videos and reading all the articles about how much pollution we put into our ocean is terrible not just for the marine life living within it, but is now starting to affect us as well. The most viable solution I can think of with this problem is to find a more healthier form of salt seasoning. I have seen organic salt in grocery stores before and I think that would be a good alternative. Another solution to this problem would probably be to avoid the use of sea salt considering that its the most contaminated with plastic.
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SummaryDiners in China who usually put salt in their food are actually consuming small pieces of plastic pollution. Researchers have recently studied about fifteen brands of regular table salt and found that there are very small, micro-sized particles of water bottle plastic called polyethylene terephthalate, polyethylene, as well as other types of plastics. What is interesting is that the highest level of plastic found in table salt is the salts that were sourced from the ocean. Reasearchers have found that there is about 250 particles of plastic per pound of sea salt. According to Huahong Shi from East China Normal University, the contamination of plastic came from the large amount of plastic pollution within the ocean. According to Shi, if a person were consuming sea salt regularly, they would be ingesting about 1,000 plastic micro-particles per year
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