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Microplastics are small pieces of plastic arising from numerous sources including fibers from synthetic clothing and eroded fragments of material from litter and other sources. They often pass undetected through municipal wastewater treatment facilities and their ingestion by fish and other wildlife can cause block digestion and alter feeding behavior. Heavy metals and manmade industrial compounds such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) can also accumulate in microplastics. This piece the threat of microplastics in our environment and is a plain stockinette rectangle on which Plastics is spelled out in a retro font in plastic beads. The font evokes the 1950s, when mass production of plastics increased dramatically in the US. The total number of stitches in this piece is 10,440. This total is representative of the number of microplastic particles (10,000 – 15,000) found by researchers at SUNY Plattsburgh to be discharged into Lake Champlain at monitored wastewater treatment facilities every day. Data from Le Tarte et al. (2019) and the Lake Champlain Basin Program.
More info available here on Ravelry.