Terms of use

This is not medical advice

The calculator estimates how many microplastic particles published studies associate with the habits you describe. It is not a diagnosis, not a measurement of your body, not a body burden, and not a health-risk score. It cannot tell you whether you are harmed, and no result here should be used to make a medical decision or to replace advice from a qualified professional.

The underlying science is young and incomplete. Published studies cover only part of what people eat, drink and breathe; different laboratories use different size cutoffs and methods, so their counts are not strictly comparable; and a category with no study is a gap in the research, not an absence of exposure. The methodology page sets out the equations, the source studies and the limits carried into every result.

Accuracy and availability

The content is offered in good faith and kept current as new work is published, but it is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind. Estimates carry wide uncertainty intervals for a reason. To the fullest extent the law allows, the maintainer is not liable for any loss arising from use of this site or reliance on anything in it.

The site may change, move or go offline at any time, and nothing here is guaranteed to remain available.

Using the site fairly

Please do not:

• submit questionnaires automatically, in bulk, or with invented answers — it is a small dataset and noise damages it;
• attempt to reach the maintenance pages, the database, or any part of the site you have not been given access to;
• interfere with the service or the ability of others to use it;
• present a result from this calculator as a clinical measurement or as a claim about a named product, company or person.

Your submissions

Completing the calculator contributes your answers to this project’s dataset with no personal identifier attached; the privacy page sets out exactly what is and is not recorded.

By submitting, you grant this project a perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to store, analyse, reproduce, adapt and publish your submission, and to allow others to do the same. That covers both aggregate use — statistics, charts and written analysis drawn from many submissions — and publication of a single submission in full, where one set of habits is worth showing on its own.

This licence is bounded by three conditions, which the project holds itself to:

• Anonymous, without exception. Only the answers, the estimate they produced and the date may be published. No name, email, address, IP address, user agent, cookie or device identifier may accompany them — none is collected, so none exists to publish.
• Identified only by a random submission ID. An individual submission is referred to solely by the random identifier assigned to it, which is not derived from you and cannot be resolved back to you. Nothing published presents a submission as belonging to a named or describable person.
• Not for profit. Submissions are not sold, licensed for a fee, rented, or supplied to advertisers, data brokers or any other commercial party. Publication is for public education and research, and earns nothing.

The licence is irrevocable in practice as much as in wording: because a submission carries nothing that ties it to you, neither you nor the project can identify which one was yours in order to withdraw it. If a published submission is itself a problem, quote its submission ID and it can be removed. Do not enter anything in the calculator that you would not want published on these terms.

Content and sources

Written material on this site may be quoted for education and journalism with attribution and a link. The underlying research belongs to the authors and publishers listed on the resources page; their terms, not these, govern their work. Images and third-party material remain the property of their owners.