Warning: Plastic In Salt
It’s going to get worse before it gets better. Plastic is poisoning us and there is no escaping it.
It feels like just five minutes ago we were reporting on the news that toxic chemicals in plastic have been proven to leach into food and cause infertility and miscarriages. It feels like just five minutes ago we were reporting that crooked traders in China were mixing plastic beads in with rice granules to cut costs.
Now, we are sad to report that those who consume sea salt are likely to be consuming small pieces of micro-plastic from ocean plastic pollution. It’s a sad state of affairs that we have polluted our oceans so badly that the wildlife is dying, regions are uninhabitable and there is a large island of rubbish bigger than the UK just floating around.
Not all table salt comes from the ocean, much of it is quarried or mined, however the vast majority is held in the earth’s water. If all the salt was extracted from the oceans and placed on the land, it would be 34 metres tall! That’s a lot of salt, but it’s also a lot of plastic!
When researchers in China suspected the likelihood of plastic in our salt, they tested fifteen major brands and found PET, Polyethylene, Cellophane and more. The two major causes of plastic ending up in your salt is from the microbeads in cosmetic products and from microscopic pieces of plastic breaking off from larger pieces in the ocean. This is the result of ocean currents and pressure moving the plastic around.
Just so you aren’t too worried, even if you ate the daily recommended amount of salt, you’d still be consuming less than 10% as much plastic than if you ate a ‘healthy’ amount of shellfish. Saying that, it’s easier to cut shellfish out of your diet than it is with salt!. The food chain really needs to be looked at and vetted more, otherwise we will end up with major poisoning crises on our hands.
