Five millimeters doesn’t sound so “micro” to me. If I find a chunk of plastic nearly a quarter of an inch in a bite of food, I’ll spit it out, not swallow it.
Little plastic fibers from clothing can be that long, but so thin as to be virtually invisible.
Maybe they mean microns, not millimeters. 1 micron is 1000 millimeters.
Microplastics are between 1 μm and 1,000 μm (1 micrometer = 0.001 mm). Visibly recognizable larger pieces are what accumulate along shorelines and in reservoirs, etc. not the ones causing human or animal disease.
That’s what I was thinking, 5mm pieces of plastic are not invisible, and floating around in the air, or in your water.
Pretty much blows the credibility of the entire article.
Good catch, stupid reporters.
From the paper:
“Microplastics are defined as plastic particles that are <5000 μm in size and can be further classified as primary or secondary depending on their source.”