HAVE PLASTICS BECOME A PART OF OUR DISH?
Oghenekevwe William Emadago
Business, Research & Advocacy. Co-founder, Girlified & Livestocx. Climate change, sustainability, International affairs and sustainability-focused entrepreneurship. O'Shaughnessy Fellow
It’s not too common to hear that a guy loves cooking. I do, and I love cooking with dried prawns. It's very common in Nigeria and we call them 'crayfish'. I love prawns because they give a delicious taste to my dish.?
I started cooking when I was twelve or thirteen, I can’t remember when specifically. I have made all the cooking mistakes you can think of, from putting too much salt in the food to getting my food burnt. I made them all. My love for prawns was borne out of my love for fish and cooking but cleaning them up before putting them in the food is one hell of a job I hate. I just have to do it anyways. Cleaning dried prawns involve removing small particles of dirt, sticks, plastic pieces, ropes, and sometimes, small shells.?
Recently I started to observe something. I began to see more plastic pieces in the arthropod. nylon bag pieces, sanitary pad pieces, plastic straws, ropes, broken pieces of fishing nets and so on. It wasn’t like this when I first learned how to cook. At that time, it was not so easy to find large (around 2-3cm) plastic pieces entangled in prawns but today I find a lot of them and I have to do more cleaning to get the debris out.?To verify if my concern is unique, I called my mum to ask if this is how it has always been. She replied in the negative and said she has also noticed an increase in the amount of plastic debris in the prawns she uses to cook. I made contact with a few women in my circle to see if they have a similar experience and all the answers were affirmative.
That was when I knew my situation was not unique and as a researcher, I knew it was time to do some digging. I decided to do some research to know exactly how, and why this is the case, and if it has any harmful effects on our health.?
Here is what I found:
The world over, plastic usage has been growing rapidly since its invention in 1907. Last year, approximately 280 million tons of plastics were produced; in 1950 it was only 1.5 million. With just over 9% of plastic recycled globally, this is building up in landfills and tons of it getting washed into water bodies. The famous marine plastic pollution quote “By 2050 there would be more plastics than fish in the ocean” comes from the fact that when these plastic materials are washed from water bodies, they end up in the ocean. And with the rate at which we are using and dumping plastics, we are bound to have more of it as time goes on. Except, of course, measures are taken to reduce reuse or eliminate plastics. A study by Ocean literacy, UNESCO says Plastic waste makes up 80% of all marine pollution and around 8 to 10 million metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year.?
With this increase in the number of plastics in the ocean, comes a lot of other challenges, for example,?fish, seabirds, sea turtles, and marine mammals can become entangled in or ingest plastic debris, causing suffocation, starvation, and drowning. We consume a lot of seafood and this is how plastics end up in our dishes.?It is estimated that one in three fish caught for human consumption contains plastic. Sometimes this plastic debris is not so visible because they are microplastics. Microplastics, as the name implies, are tiny pieces of plastic less than 5 millimetres long that come from plastic pieces that have been broken down into smaller pieces over time. The ocean's miniature inhabitants can shred a small plastic bag - the type used to hold groceries - into 1.75 million microscopic fragments, according to a new study. With so many microplastics in the ocean, we can see how inevitable it is for us to find them in our food.?
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What are the health implications??
The presence of microplastics in seafood poses a major hazard to human health. This ingestion of plastic is not only deadly for fish, but also dangerous for the entire food chain, and therefore for humans! Seafood is an essential part of the human diet. Microplastic?contamination of the intestinal system poses a serious risk of spreading to other regions of the body.?Some potential effects of eating microplastic-contaminated seafood include:
These are just a few risks that have been identified by researchers. As we progress in research we are bound to make new discoveries on the health implications of microplastics on human health. This is my way of drawing your attention to the problem of plastic pollution. I want to use this opportunity to call on everyone to take measures to reduce, reuse or recycle all plastic materials to save our planet and our health; and also save me the extra stress of cleaning my prawn before cooking.?
I am Emadago Oghenekevwe I write about climate change, sustainability and building sustainable startups. Follow me here on LinkedIn and as @veinmannsch on Twitter.
Contact me via email: [email protected]