No, you don’t eat a credit card worth of plastic every week. But you still swallow a lot of it – By Matthew Rozsa (Salon) / June 16, 2023
Some statistics claim the average person consumes 5 grams of plastic per week. Reality is much more shocking
Imagine enjoying a fresh salad, a juicy steak or a fluffy pastry. As your taste buds savor the various flavors, the enjoyable experience is suddenly and unpleasantly interrupted by a loud crunch sound. When you spit out your food and look at the contents, you discover to your horror that there is a credit card embedded within your meal.
The good news is that, if this experience has ever literally happened to a person, it is definitely not common. The bad news is that — while humans are not literally eating credit cards — the problem of plastic pollution is so pervasive that, in one sense, we might as well be eating them. That is why in 2019 the World Wildlife Fund famously declared — using research from the University of Newcastle, Australia — that people eat the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. While it may not sound like a big deal to learn that you are ingesting 5 grams of plastic every week, the statistic hits more viscerally when compared to a literal credit card.
Yet to what extent are humans actually consuming all of this plastic? And more importantly, what kind of risks are involved with eating these materials? To get to the bottom of these questions, Salon spoke by email with Dr. Douglas Walker, an Associate Professor of Environmental Health at Emory University Rollins School of Public Health.
