we inhale or ingest roughly 68,000 microplastic particles every 24 hours... even on Christmas.

at the time of this writing, the most common sources of microplastics in your kitchen are, in no particular order:

• plastic cutting boards
• microwaveable food container
• plastic ice cube trays
• tea bags (plastic sealant and/or the bag itself)
• white paper cups (made waterproof with plastic)

if you turned every piece of plastic that we have made as of the time of this writing into saran wrap, it would cover the entire planet.

we haven't done that, but the result is exactly the same: every square inch of our entire planet's surface - even at the bottom of the ocean and the top of mount everest - is covered in plastic.

at the time of this writing, the average human being consumes the equivalent of a credit card's worth of plastic every week.

it takes 1,000 years for a plastic bag to degrade in a landfill. this doesn't mean that they go away. instead, they become microplastics (sometimes also called nanoplastics) which absorb toxins and continue to pollute the environment.

1 out of every 3 dead leatherback turtles choked to death on a plastic bag. the turtles eat them because they resemble jellyfish, which are a common food for the turtles.

almost all plastic produced in the u.s. ends up in landfills or the ocean - more than 1,500,000 tons per year. 

this is because many kinds of plastic cannot be recycled. and even when a plastic can be recycled, it is much less expensive to produce new plastic than it is to recycle old plastic.

the companies that produce plastic have always known this, but they deliberately lie about it.

in the u.s., every citizen uses an average of 365 single-use plastic bags per year.

in denmark, the average citizen uses 4 single-use plastic bags per year.

at the time of this writing, humans produce 5 trillion single-use plastic bags.

none of them are recycled.

laundry pods dissolve into microplastic. and because no water treatment plant in any country is equipped to filter them, the microplastic goes right into our rivers, streams, and lakes. and from there into all of the fish, mollusks, water plants, and... us.

the average plastic bottle of water contains 250,000 pieces of nanoplastic that you swallow when you drink. they are as small as a virus and can pass the blood/brain barrier, which means that once you drink, they spread throughout your entire body.

so what does that do to you?

no one knows. yet.

75% of the plastic pollution on earth (including the ocean) is dust from car and truck tires wearing down. the particles are so small that they pass directly from any animals gills/lungs into its blood, and from there to the brain. (that includes us.)

at the time of this writing, if you fill a bucket with seawater from any ocean in the world, it also contains 8 million pieces of microplastic.

every fish, shrimp, mollusk, and lobster that you eat contains plastic, too. and you know what?

so do you.

if you drink bottled water, you should know that you are also drinking tiny particles of plastic, an average of 324 particles per liter. they are also found in almost all seafood, beer, sea salt, and the air.

only 9% of all of the plastic ever created has been recycled. all of the rest is pollution.