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Since microplastics (MPs) bring the potential risks to human health when plastics are ingested, more needs to be known about the presence and abundance of human ingestion of MPs. To address these issues, we reviewed 108 publications in Web of Science concerning abundances, sources, and analytical methods of MPs in human daily intake including fish, salt, drinking water, beverages, package food, and other food. The results demonstrate that aquatic food products (fish and bivalves) present a wide range of 0–10.5 items/g for bivalves and 0–20 items/individual for fish. Salt data in literatures present a concentration of 0–13,629 particles/kg. Drinking water is also a pathway of MPs exposure to human, presenting a concentration range from 0 to 61 particles/L for tap water and 0 to 6292 MPs/L for bottled water. Besides, MPs have been found in beverages, package food, sugar, honey, vegetables, and fruits. Therefore, human intake of MPs via ingestion is a nonnegligible exposure route.

Microplastics (MPs) in aquatic organisms are raising increasing concerns regarding their potential damage to ecosystems. To date, Raman and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy techniques have been widely used for detection of MPs in aquatic organisms, which requires complex protocols of tissue digestion and MP separation and are time- and reagent-consuming. This novel approach directly separates, identifies, and characterizes MPs from the hyperspectral image (HSI) of the intestinal tract content in combination with a support vector machine classification model, instead of using the real digestion/separation protocols. The procedures of HSI acquisition (1 min) and data analysis (5 min) can be completed within 6 min plus the sample preparation and drying time (30 min) where necessary. This method achieved a promising efficiency (recall >98.80%, precision >96.22%) for identifying five types of MPs (particles >0.2 mm). Moreover, the method was also demonstrated to be effective on field fish from three marine fish species, revealing satisfying detection accuracy (particles >0.2 mm) comparable to Raman analysis. The present technique omits the digestion protocol (reagent free), thereby significantly reducing reagent consumption, saving time, and providing a rapid and efficient method for MP analysis.

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