A new study has made an unsavoury finding about salt. Delicious, delectable salt, it turns out is packed with plastic.
Not packed in plastic, no, although it often is too. Rather, the salt we eat contains an alarming amount of microplastics.
Sea salt was found to contain as much as double the amount of microplastics (550 to 681 microplastic particles per kilogram of salt) as lake salt and up to triple the amount found in rock salt, according to a study of 15 brands of salt sold in China.
Plastic in Chinese salt is one thing. Does it apply to the rest of the world’s salt? To ours?
“Plastics have become such a ubiquitous contaminant, I doubt it matters whether you look for plastic in sea salt on Chinese or American supermarket shelves,” Sherri Mason, an environmental science researcher at the State University of New York Fredonia, told Scientific American. “I’d like to see some ‘me-too’ studies,” she added.