Are we eating plastic-ingesting fish?

Microplastic contamination in the San Francisco Bay, California, USA

“…Using a dissection microscope, plastic particles were removed, enumerated, and categorized into five classifications: fragment, pellet (spherical particle), fiber/line, film or foam (Free et al, 2014;McCormick et al, 2014). While instrumental analysis methods such as infrared or Raman spectroscopy are necessary for polymeric identification (i.e., polyethylene versus polypropylene), numerous studies have employed only visual identification for microplastic classification (e.g., Bond et al, 2014;Lavers et al, 2014;Devriese et al, 2015;Rochman et al, 2015;Romeo et al, 2015;Fossia et al, 2016;Hammer et al, 2016;Miranda and Carvalho-Souza, 2016;Nicolau et al, 2016;Peters and Bratton, 2016). Given the source (i.e., wastewater), fibers obtained in this processing would presumably be anthropogenic and derived from textiles, though a portion of fibers observed in wastewater may not be plastic, instead derived from other anthropogenic sources (Remy et al, 2015; Nirmela Arsem, personal communication).…”

Artificially Sweetened Beverages and the Response to the Global Obesity Crisis

“…High consumption of sweetened beverages leads to high generation of solid waste and cumulative chemical pollution, affecting marine life and contaminating the food chain, which raise concerns regarding food safety for human health [57–59]. The volume of water required to produce a 0.5 L plastic bottle of carbonated soft drink is estimated to range from 150 up to 300 L of water [60].…”

A zero percent plastic ingestion rate by silver hake (Merluccius bilinearis) from the south coast of Newfoundland, Canada

“…2-3). The benthopelagic category boasted the highest average %FO (16.3%; n=36, SD=29.8) (via Possatto et al, 2011;Anastasopoulou et al, 2013;Neves et al, 2015;Phillips & Bonner, 2016;Rochman et al, 2015;Rummel et al, 2016), followed by the bathypelagic (15.7%; n=44, SD=25.6) )(via Possatto et al, 2011;Anastasopoulou et al, 2013;Foekema et al, 2013;Lusher et al, 2013;Di Beneditto & Awabdi, 2014;Neves et al, 2015;Phillips & Bonner, 2015;Bråte et al, 2016;Phillips & Bonner, 2016;Rochman et al, 2015;Rummel et al, 2016), demersal (15.5%; n=62, SD=24.0) (via Possatto et al, 2011;Dantas et al, 2012;Ramos et al, 2012;Anastasopoulou et al, 2013;Foekema et al, 2013;Lusher et al, 2013;Neves et al, 2015;Rochman et al, 2015;Miranda & de Carvalho-Souza, 2016;Phillips & Bonner, 2015;Phillips & Bonner, 2016;Rummel et al, 2016), pelagic (14.3%; n=53, SD=20.2), and bathydemersal (3.6%; n=7, SD=7.2) (via Anastasopoulou et al, 2013;Neves et al, 2015) zones. The bathydemersal category was severely limited in number of reported %FO values (n=7), and correspondingly fell well outside of the range of %FO exhibited by the other categories (all falling within the range of 14.3-16.3%) (via Anastasopoulou et al, 2013;Neves et al, 2015).…”