If You Chew Gum, This Is How Many Pieces of Microplastic You Could Be Ingesting Every Year

A new study found that both natural and synthetic gum shed microplastics, with each piece of gum producing about 100 pieces

Chewing gum can shed microplastics — and natural and synthetic gums contain “similar amounts of microplastics.”

Each stick of gum releases an average of 100 pieces of microplastic into saliva — with some shedding up to 600 pieces — according to an American Chemical Society (ACS) release on the study, which will be presented at the upcoming ACS conference.  

“Our goal is not to alarm anybody,” Sanjay Mohanty, the project’s principal investigator and an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said in the release. “Scientists don’t know if microplastics are unsafe to us or not. There are no human trials. But we know we are exposed to plastics in everyday life, and that’s what we wanted to examine here.”

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The surprising data came when Mohanty and a graduate student, Lisa Lowe, measured the difference in plastics shed by natural, and synthetic gum. “Our initial hypothesis was that the synthetic gums would have a lot more microplastics because the base is a type of plastic,” Lowe said in the release.

Instead, “both synthetic and natural gums had similar amounts of microplastics released when we chewed them,” Lowe said. The release says large pieces of gum release up to 3,000 pieces of.microplastic into saliva — and estimates that if someone chews up to 180 sticks of gum a year, they could consume 30,000 pieces of microplastic.

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The study was conducted two ways. First, by subjects chewing a piece of gum for four minutes and taking a saliva sample every 30 seconds. Then, saliva samples were taken when the gum was chewed for 20 minutes.  The brands used in the study weren’t identified, but the release said that they tested ten bands — five synthetic, five natural — that were all commercially available.

Most of the microplastic is shed in the first two minutes of chewing, the release says, because the grinding of teeth causes the plastic to break off.

“The plastic released into saliva is a small fraction of the plastic that’s in the gum,” Mohanty said in the release. “So, be mindful about the environment and don’t just throw it outside or stick it to a gum wall.”