We consume a lot of plastic in our daily lives!

Gulf News

Special report: We ingest a credit-card sized amount of plastic every week, according to a study.  Report says the largest source of plastic ingestion is drinking water. Read the article to know how you can reduce your plastic consumption. Visit gulfnews.com/1.66086402 #gulfnews #plastic #recycle #plasticpollution #plasticconsumption

Transcript

00:00Hello readers, this is Suchitra Bajpai Choudhury from Gulf News. I'm going to talk about the

00:14pollution of plastics and the impact it is having on our health in everyday life. Do

00:19you know that we are consuming a credit card size of plastic every week, each one of us.

00:26That is about 5 grams of plastic is being consumed by us. And what impact can it have

00:30over our health is still not yet decided. As WHO says, we don't know fully what is

00:36the impact. But having so much of plastic everyday into our lives is bound to have some

00:42kind of toxicity or poisoning. Because plastic contains biospinal, it contains dioxides,

00:48it contains phthalates, it contains a lot of other toxins like cadmium and lead. And

00:53all these are known to have direct impact on your hormonal imbalance, respiratory allergies,

00:59childbirth defects, cancers. So we don't know what really plastic is doing to us. Now

01:06you might ask, how do we really ingest this much plastic? Well, if you look around, everything

01:11that we use has plastics. From bottles, plastic bottles, to plastic tiffins, to plastic packets,

01:20cling films, wraps, even the cosmetics we use have nano beads, plastic microbeads for

01:25you know better scrub effect or better clean effect. So in effect, we are integrating a

01:29lot of plastic. When we drink water from a bottle, we have very very fine microfibers

01:38that we are ingesting along with the water. And the other major source of plastic ingestion

01:43is table salt and shellfish. So shellfish is something we have whole when it's taken

01:50out of the sea. And it has a lot of plastic in its stomach which goes straight into your

01:53stomach. And then the table salts when they are taken out and processed, they have a lot

01:59of plastic from the sea as well. So we are taking a lot of plastic. In fact, there's

02:04a report from Australia, from the Newcastle University which says we are ingesting 1769

02:11particles from water alone. So everywhere the level of plastics in water is very high.

02:17In America alone, 94.4% of all water samples contain plastics. So how and what can we do

02:25to reduce this proliferation in our everyday life? We can say no to first-use plastic at

02:32least completely. We can say no to first-use plastic. The other things you can do is replace

02:37your entire plastic bottles and plastic lunch boxes by ceramic or steel lunch boxes and

02:44glass bottles. You can have, instead of taking disposable sort of plastics in the department

02:52store, you can carry your own cloth bags and ask not to be given plastics. You can try

02:57and make your own scrubs at home. You can try and make your own household cleansers.

03:02That is not going too far. But you can at least start with a small little difference

03:06in your life and eliminate first-use plastics from your life completely. Stop using disposable

03:11spoons. Stop using chewing gum which has some synthetic plastics and which you just discard

03:17on the road. So there are a lot of things that you can do. We have written a very detailed

03:22story in Gulf News which completely outlines the kind of steps you can take and the damage

03:27that plastic is doing to your body. And you can read the whole thing in either the paper

03:32today or online. So please go for the detailed story on Gulf News today.

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