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Millions of tonnes of plastics have been released into the environment. Although the risk of plastics to humans is not yet resolved, microplastics, in the range of 1 μm -5 mm, have entered our bodies, originating either from ingestion via the food chain or from inhalation of air. Generally there are two sources of microplastics, either directly from industry, such as cosmetic exfoliants, or indirectly from physical, chemical and biological fragmentation of large (>5 mm) plastic residues. We have found that microplastics can be generated by simple tasks in our daily lives such as by scissoring with scissors, tearing with hands, cutting with knives or twisting manually, to open plastics containers/bags/tapes/ caps. These processes can generate about 0.46-250 microplastic/cm. This amount is dependent on the conditions such as stiffness, thickness, anisotropy, the density of plastic materials and the size of microplastics.This finding sends an important warning, that we must be careful when opening plastic packaging, if we are concerned about microplastics and care about reducing microplastics contamination.are still not fully understood. For example, rather than industry sources (primary one) or as the fragements of industial products (secondary one), do we generate microplastics by ourselves in our daily life? Here, we investigate the possible generation of microplastics during the opening of plastic packages. That is, microplastics could be generated every day, such as when we open a plastic bag to eat chocolate, cut or tear sealing tape to open a package, twist or open a bottle to drink water, beer, etc. We use quartz crystal microbalance (QCM) in combination with Raman and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR) to chemically identify microplastic. In the meantime, we employ scanning electron microscopy (SEM) to physically visualise microplastics for further investigation of their morphology. Scientific RepoRtS |(2020) 10:4841 | https://doi.

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