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Plastic Pollution: Understanding the Threat of Microplastics

Microplastics- These are the pieces of plastics that are less than 5mm in size and are present in the environment from various sources of plastics. Humans couldn’t have possibly imagined that a simple invention back in 1909, by “Leo Hendrik Baekeland” called the Bakelite (the first synthetic plastic – “phenol formaldehyde resin”), could become a threat to the environment. The commercial success of this product lead to inventions of many more plastics like LDPE, HDPE, PVC, Polystyrene etc.  After this human have accepted plastics so fast that we can easily see how dependent we have become on the plastic.  The global plastic industry in 2020 was valued at 580-billion-dollar industry. Plastics are now everywhere and in every industry. Why is plastic becoming a problem to us? There are many perspectives to this, but I will discuss 3 of them.        The non-biodegradable nature of the plastic.        Accumulation of microplastics in foo...