Love eating ice-cold oysters-on-the-half-shell in the summertime? Enjoy a large bowl of mussels cooked in garlic, wine, butter and parsley? Then you may be a bit discouraged to learn that, as per Megan Schaltegger at Delish, both oysters and mussels "contain 'disturbingly high levels of fiberglass.'" Perhaps it's a good time to curtail your consumption a bit, at least in the interim.
Schaltegger writes that The Journal of Hazardous Materials published the research; lead author Corina Ciocan tells Newsweek that "our findings show a disturbing level of glass-reinforced plastic contamination in marine life." The shellfish samples, which were collected on the south coast of England, reportedly contained "11,220 glass particles per kilogram, while the mussels had 2,740 particles per kilogram," as per Schaltegger.
As noted by Pandora Dewan at Newsweek, "fiberglass is a reinforced plastic material embedded with extremely fine fibers of glass." It should also be stated that not online shellfish showed high fiberglass particles; Ciocan said that "We identified fiberglass embedded in other organic material floating in the water, like seagrass and seaweed fragments, small snails etc."
Ciocan says that the reason behind this is because the shellfish are "ingesting the particles through filter feeding by mistakes," noting that this is a "stark reminder of the hidden dangers in our environment." Fay Couceiro, another study author, told Newsweek that "we're just starting to understand the extend of fiberglass contamination," while Ciocan noted that "I hope that more researchers will start looking for fiberglass contamination in the coastal environment so that the industry and regulators can take it very seriously and start investing in recycling strategies and natural materials to replace glass-reinforced plastic."
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