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"Particles" is almost useless as a measure. They're not movie tickets, I'm not interested in their discreet number. Give me a defined quantity. Is 10,000 particles 1 gram, half a gram, a tenth of a gram, what?
"You're eating far too many particles of salt, we're going to need to to cut back by at least 2,000 particles every lunar cycle."
It's also meaningless without the context of how many particles other people consume.
Aha! So, now a more informative headline could be something like, "People Who Drink Bottled Water on a Daily Basis Ingest 3 Times as Many Microplastic Particles Each Year."
Which I would argue is also far scarier than just some out of context bigish number.
But, I'm with you on ditching "particles" altogether and providing it in a standard measurement.
Good point. But particle size is also important. Swallow a small sphere of 10g of plastic and it passes through you largely without consequence. 10g of nanoparticles and its in every one of your organs doing god knows what.
Which is kind of what I'm getting at. I've read that we have the equivalent to as much as a crayons worth of micro plastics in our brain. A crayon, while not particularly scientific, puts a pretty fine point on the issue in an intuitive sense, and also addresses the cumulative nature of the pollution. By the head line it seems like they are only talking about a certain sized micro plastic, and without further context they might as well just say "a lot".
Great, how convenient that the latter option is based on mass, just as the OP requested. The researchers should clarify the number based on total mass.
Yeah, I'm waiting for the comments in the style of "an average person ingests 3*10^12 plastic particles each year." I have no reference to the number.