Animal Digestible Food Packaging Initiative

According to an April 8, 2020 ScienceDaily story “… lobsters can eat and break down … microplastic material, releasing even smaller fragments into the water …” https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/04/200408104929.htm “… Microplastic pollution that makes its way into the ocean eventually sinks to the seabed … In lobsters collected near Sardinia in the Mediterranean Sea … researchers found that larger plastic particles became trapped in the crustaceans’ stomachs. However, some particles passed into the ‘gastric mill,’ a complex of small calcified plates that grind against each other to break down food in a lobster’s stomach. This process fragmented some of the plastic into smaller particles … These findings highlight the existence of a new kind of ‘secondary’ microplastic, introduced into the environment by living organisms, that could represent a significant pathway of plastic degradation in the deep sea … these tinier particles could then be more bioavailable to smaller creatures in the deep-sea food chain …” – The March 19, 2020 ACS Environ. Sci. Technol. research report is here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.9b07705 #Microplastic #SingleUsePlastic #FoodPackaging #PlasticWaste