SANTA BARBARA, Calif., Jan. 27 (UPI) -- Accumulating "microplastic" in the marine environment is a threat to ocean shorelines and may be entering the food chain, U.S. researchers say.

The microscopic plastic debris has been traced to washing synthetic clothing, which releases thousands tiny fibers per garment with every washing, they said.


Previous research has found tiny microparticles of plastic were being consumed by marine animals and entering the food chain.

"Research we had done before ... showed that when we looked at all the bits of plastic in the environment, about 80 percent was made up from smaller bits of plastic," Mark Browne, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, told BBC News.

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"This really led us to the idea of what sorts of plastic are there and where did they come from."

To measure how widespread the presence of microplastic was on shorelines, researchers gathered samples from 18 beaches around the globe, including in Britain, India and Singapore.

"We found that there was no sample from around the world that did not contain pieces of microplastic," Brown said.

Sewage discharges were the source of the plastic contamination of the shorelines, the researchers confirmed.

"Some polyester garments released more than 1,900 fibers per garment, per wash," Brown said.

"It may not sound like an awful lot, but if that is from a single item from a single wash, it shows how things can build up.

"It suggests to us that a large proportion of the fibers we were finding in the environment, in the strongest evidence yet, was derived from the sewerage as a consequence from washing clothes."