How much plastic are we actually eating?

Imagine enjoying a fresh salad, a juicy steak or a fluffy pastry. As your taste buds savor the various flavors, the enjoyable experience is suddenly and unpleasantly interrupted by a loud crunch sound. When you spit out your food and look at the contents, you discover to your horror that there is a credit card embedded within your meal.

While it may not sound like a big deal to learn that you are ingesting 5 grams of plastic every week, the statistic hits more viscerally when compared to a literal credit card.

The good news is that, if this experience has ever literally happened to a person, it is definitely not common. The bad news is that — while humans are not literally eating credit cards — the problem of plastic pollution is so pervasive that, in one sense, we might as well be eating them. That is why in 2019 the World Wildlife Fund famously declared — using research from the University of Newcastle, Australia — that people eat the equivalent of a credit card's worth of plastic every week. While it may not sound like a big deal to learn that you are ingesting 5 grams of plastic every week, the statistic hits more viscerally when compared to a literal credit card.