A team at Memorial University has embarked on a four-year research project to determine the impact of microplastics on babies while in-utero.

It’s believed that the average person ingests a credit card’s worth of plastic every month, and while MUN says it’s a concerning image, it’s not clear how accurate that is, or how concerned people should be.

The federal government has provided $2.1 million to three university teams to determine the impact of microplastics on human health.

One of those teams is at Memorial. Drs. Karl Jobst and Lindsay Cahill of the Department of Chemistry are developing analytical methods in the lab to measure microplastics in blood, tissue samples, drinking water and indoor air.

Dr. Karl Jobst says plastics are “absolutely everywhere,” in everyday household items, clothing, construction materials, and children’s toys just to name a few. Over time, says Jobst, those plastics break down into smaller particles.

“Micro-plastics are particles that are smaller than 5 mm in diameter and nano-plastics are smaller than one micron in diameter. And, over time humans are exposed to these through inhalation of indoor dust, consumption of drinking water, food contaminated by food packaging…so what we want to know is how much are we drinking? How much are we breathing? How much of this material is accumulating in blood and tissue? And (we) ultimately want to know whether these exposures result in adverse health effects.”