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any1yesterday at 7:11 PM1 replyview on HN

I used to work for a company that makes equipment for the food processing industry.

Sometimes conveyor belts would be left running for days or even weeks in the test area. After a while, you would start to see very fine dust on and around the conveyor belts. This was finely ground POM plastic. On some occasions, there were actually heaps of that stuff forming beneath the conveyor belts.

In the factories, everything gets washed down with pressure washers at least once per day, so very little of this stuff goes into the food, but it definitely gets washed away out to sea.

I think that there is probably a wide-spread misunderstanding on how the micro-plastics enter the food. It does not seem very likely that it would come from the packaging or your tupperware (unless your tupperware is so old that it has actually started to disintegrate). It seems much likelier that the plastics were in the food before it was packaged.


Replies

alliaoyesterday at 11:12 PM

beats metal shavings I guess...