(Image: Marje Cannon/Getty)
Read more: Click here to read the original, longer version of this story.
IT鈥橲 not what you want in your seafood. Fish caught off the coasts of California and Indonesia have plastics and textile fibres in their guts, raising food safety concerns.
Advertisement
at the University of California, Davis, and her team visited local markets and sampled 64 fish from a dozen Californian species, and 76 fish from 11 Indonesian species. They found artificial debris in around a quarter of the fish and more than half of the species, including varieties of mackerel and herring in Indonesia and Chinook salmon and Pacific anchovy in California (Scientific Reports, ).
聯Affected fish included Indonesian mackerel and herring, and Pacific anchovy in California聰
The debris was mainly textiles in the US fish, and plastic in the Indonesian fish. Rochman says this may reflect differences in waste management: the US recycles more plastics but also produces more washing machine effluent. It鈥檚 not yet clear if any chemicals from the gut debris can contaminate fish flesh.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淔ish gobble plastic鈥�
