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Comment by markbnine | Hacker News Reader

Aren't microplastics already in chickens? Do they get passed to the eggs? If so, where do you filter microplastics first. . . the chicken or the egg?

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Don’t buy cheap eggs. The plastic is introduced via the feed, through vectors like expired bread products. There’s nothing wrong with using expired baked goods. The issue comes when they don’t take off the plastic wrapping and just let everything be shredded into the feed.

I do not believe grass fed chickens have the same problem.

Grass fed chickens also contain microplastics. So does every living organism these days.

What you refer to is literally feeding them plastics. Which I hope is a myth but would totally not surprise me at all.

Some animals have more microplastics than others due to their environment and other living conditions. Factory farm animals literally have plastic in their feed.

I strongly doubt they shred the plastic packaging into the feed. That said, plastic is already in everything. It's in our blood, in the placenta of fetuses. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a chicken that doesn't have microplastics in its blood.

It's apparently not economical to separate the plastic packaging from expired product. I've seen the same happen to old packets of biscuits being shredded.

I always think environmental charities should prepare an advert against the practice with a family eating breakfast, then one person picking some plastic packaging from their teeth.

You can see a Youtube video of it happening here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSse5hX4hI4

But that video shows them separating the packaging from the food.

I may have not used the right video, I can remember watching a documentary in the UK where things weren't separated properly, and they showed pieces of blue wrapping still in the feed.

It is actually legal to do so in most states, and since it’s cheaper, you can be sure that it happens.

That's sadly a very convincing argument.

This is old news. It's a common practice that is still being done.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/15/legal-pl...

There's even tiktok videos of people doing it.

My, my, a new chicken and egg problem!

But seriously, this does raise genuine concerns about what is the acceptable limit for microplastics in the egg whites initially, since microplastics have made way to everything we consume today.

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