‘Contact lenses source of microplastic pollution’

WASHINGTON: Contact lenses that are flushed down the toilet or dropped in sink drains contribute vastly to microplastic pollution in the oceans, researchers warned on Monday.

The amount of plastic waste created by lenses and their packaging in the United States alone is equal to 400 million toothbrushes each year, said researchers at Arizona State University who described their findings at the National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society in Boston. "These are significant pollutants", researcher Rolf Halden of ASU’s Biodesign Institute’s Center for Environmental Health Engineering told reporters.