Plastic leaves its traces in unexpected places — like your dentist’s office

Replacing a filling or shaving down a crown is a routine part of dental care. But those procedures can also send plastic particles down the drain — waste that South Florida’s wastewater systems aren’t designed to catch.

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That plastic gets ground into microplastics during adjustments and ends up in municipal water, where its tiny size makes it impossible to filter out.

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Jensen Beach dentist Colt Canepa, who calls this “the plastic era” of dentistry, estimated that each dental office flushes about a shot-glass worth of microplastics and nanoplastics — smaller than micro — down the drain per day, a practice he worries is adding to the region’s plastic pollution problem.

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Read the full story at Sun-Sentinel.com.