Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastics. According to the European Food Safety Authority, microplastics are defined as small plastic particle mixtures with size between 0.1 micrometers to 5,000 micrometers (5mm).
How big is a micrometer?
If you don’t know how big it is, just to imagine by cutting the diameter of a hair in half for one hundred times, and that would be the size of one micrometer. Hair is one of the smallest things that we can see with our naked eye. Therefore, we can only see the bigger microplastics but not the smaller ones.
Polyfoam and plastic bottles will break down into microplastics over time. And microplastics are added to exfoliating cleanser during production.
Some microplastics can be seen with our bare eye, while some are invisible. And the microplastics have already been found throughout the environment, from ocean to soil, and in the air.