On August 5, 2020, researchers with the University of Queensland in Australia reported finding the presence of microplastics in “… samples of popular seafood such as prawns, oysters and crabs, with the highest content found in sardines …” https://www.uq.edu.au/news/article/2020/08/research-reveals-microplastic-content-levels-seafood – The research report is here: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.0c02337 – The abstract notes that “… Microplastic contamination of the marine environment is widespread, but the extent to which the marine food web is contaminated is not yet known. The aims of this study were to … develop and apply a simple seafood sample cleanup, extraction, and quantitative analysis method using pyrolysis gas chromatography mass spectrometry to improve the detection of plastic contamination … This method allows the identification and quantification of polystyrene, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene, and poly(methyl methacrylate) in the edible portion of five different seafood organisms: oysters, prawns, squid, crabs, and sardines … This method is a major development in the standardization of plastic quantification techniques used in seafood …” #MicroPlastics
Animal Digestible Food Packaging Initiative
Our reason-for-being/goal/purpose/objective/intent is to convince/inspire/persuade/encourage the food processing industry to establish and fund a public private partnership for the discovery of new food packaging materials that would be digestible by animals (farm animals as well as ubiquitous microbes).
