June 12, 2019

expert reaction to a wwf commissioned report on plastic ingestion by people

Reactions to a report from the WWF that comments on the amount of plastic an average person ingests from water.

Prof Alastair Grant, Professor of Ecology, University of East Anglia (UEA), said:

“The report does not present evidence that consuming even the highest figure (which represents approximately 250 particles a day) presents a risk to human health.

“Plastic waste is a serious environmental concern – larger items can entangle wildlife; fragments a few millimetres across may be eaten in large quantities by fish or birds which mistake them for food particles. There have been a number of recent reports of plastic waste from the developed world that had supposedly been “recycled” ending up being dumped or burned in developing countries. Burning plastic in developing countries is likely to have much more serious health effects than those from rather small numbers of plastic particles in food and water.” 

Quote edited at authors request at 09:14 12/06/19

* ‘No Plastic in Nature: Assessing Plastic Ingestion from Nature to People’ is based on a study commissioned by WWF and carried out by University of Newcastle, Australia. 

Declared interests

Prof Grant: “I don’t have any conflicts of interest.”