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Scientific Insights on Omnipresent Microplastics
Scientific India
|March - April 2020
Globally we all are well aware of the disadvantages of plastics. Unlike leaves or papers, plastics are not biodegradable.
On the contrary, large size plastics are decomposed into small-sized plastics over a period of time due to exposure to sunlight. These broken plastics, which are called microplastics, blend in our environment in a way that they are unidentifiable. Microplastics are very small pieces of plastics with size less than 5 millimeters. The microplastics enter our environment in two ways. On one hand, small-sized plastics are created for the purpose of cosmetics, face wash, and in some cases microfilaments come out of the garment products. On the other hand, the plastic waste such as plastic bags and water bottles that we lay in the garbage decompose into smaller particles over a period of time. It is estimated that about 12.7 million tons of plastics are dumped into the ocean every year.
Scientific Insights on Microplastics
This story is from the March - April 2020 edition of Scientific India.
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