Microplastics Are Discovered Lurking in Commercial Sea Salt

Humanity’s done a good job of trashing the ocean with trillions of microplastics—degraded material from packaging, beauty products, fishing gear, and other stuff—and now the seas are returning the favor, contaminating edible sea salt with bits of polyethylene terephthalate and cellophane.

This dismal discovery was made by researchers at East China Normal University and elsewhere, who write in a new, government-funded study about worrying plastic concentrations in salts at Chinese supermarkets. They filtered 15 brands of commercial salt, including lake and rock varieties for comparison, and found as many as 681 plastic particles per kilogram of sea salt. Using World Health Organization diet guidelines, they calculate sea-salt users could be unintentionally consuming roughly 1,000 pieces of plastic a year.