People eat about a credit card’s worth of plastic every week, it was revealed at a youth climate change summit yesterday.

The stomach-churning news was featured in a video presentation that showed that people ingested about five grams of microplastics from their food and water intake – which could cause major health problems.

Katherine Burns, of Natural Nutrition Bermuda, warned that plastics can cause fertility problems in men and women and lead to the development of diabetes and obesity.

She said: “A lot of these plastics are highly oestrogenic and that has an impact on male fertility and sperm counts.

“We’re seeing that fertility levels are dropping and women are having a harder time getting pregnant.”

The presentation added that about 147 million tonnes of plastic – about half of what is used a year – ends up in the sea and that the amount of plastic was expected to outweigh the fish population by 2025.

The video was shown on the second day of the Youth Climate Summit.

The live-streamed event, organised by the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute, examined how climate change affected the environment and risked the safety of people.

Sumnima Ghimire, a researcher at the Youth For Environment Education and Development Foundation in Nepal, highlighted that more than 80 per cent of natural disasters were climate-related.

She added that climate-linked disasters had doubled over the past 40 years and that Indigenous populations were harmed the most, despite making the smallest contribution to climate change.

Read more here: https://www.royalgazette.com/environment/news/article/20211124/plastic-not-fantastic-as-climate-change-summit-hears-its-in-food-and-water/