Most people grow up to be a plastic human from the birth. Wearing disposable diapers, sucking a plastic feeding bottle, putting on a plastic clothes, or playing with plastic toys is such things. Our daily life also starts with plastic and ends with plastic. The first step after we woke up in the morning is always with a bottle of shampoo made from plastic. Besides, in the process of ready to school or staying at school, we can find products made from plastic such as cars, computers, cell phone, credit cards. You know there is no end to listing the plastic products as well as me. Nowadays, it's so famous that we aren't surprised about how much plastic surround us. However, it could be dull to know how much plastic is in us.

The fact that seafood such as fish, shellfish has microplastics is well-known because they are from the ocean where the microplastics come.

So we tend to ignore the freshwater like drinking water, which affects most of our lives. However, we came close to doubt every single bottled water on the market.

Researchers at New York State University studied bottled water sold in nine countries. On average, there were 325 pieces of microplastics per bottle. Even worse, there were also bottled waters with 10,000 microplastics per liter. Plus, the bottled water which had no microplastics were only 17 bottles of water among researched 259 bottled water. In conclusion, nine out of ten bottled water surveyed contained plastic. 

In this connection, EBS had an interesting experiment. What eight subjects need to do is to take a blood test after eating food in a plastic container for 100 hours. The production team compared the levels of environmental hormones in the blood before and after the test. The result of the experiment was this. All the subjects' environmental hormones increased from three times to thirteen times. It means that plastic's negative influence can convey through only eating with plastic container. 

Plastics in us is the microplastics. We all know to reduce microplastic is very important but hard. But can you believe that there's a town in Japan that rarely discharges the living waste, including the plastic? It is Kamikatsu. 

The town has a unique recycling center, which has 45 recycling boxes. It helps people to classify more specifically. Not only that, but there are paper attached that you can't see in other recycling centers. It tells us how waste is disposed of here, how much it costs, how much it will reward to the region. Profits of Kamikatsu from selling waste plastics are 25 million won to 30 million won a year. Thanks to this, it is loved by people there. The goal here is zero waste until 2020. Given that they have recycled 80 percent of their trash so far, it's not an impossible goal. To make it advance, they have had a project that presents cloth diapers to families with babies.

The ideal wish is for the whole world to become like Kamikatsu. It is excessive demand to apply Kamikatsu's system to the world right now. But let's start from searching the internet for cloth diapers as a gift, if not 45 separate boxes. 

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Reference literature 

Mason, Sherri A. et al(2018), "Synthetic Polymer Contamination in Bottled Water", Frontiers in Chemistry, 6:407

EBS[플라스틱 인류 2부 플라스틱 다이어트],2013

Seeker Stories(2015), "How this town Produces No Trash" [Video file]

The Nippon Communications Foundation(2018), "The Kamikatsu Zero Waste Campaign: How a little Town Achieved a Top Recycling Rate", July 13.