Today I learned that mowing your lawn with a string trimmer or “wheat eater” as some people seem to call them, causes microplastics to be spread around your garden. Obviously one might says as the line those trimmers use are made of plastic but it took me to watch a slow-motion video about how they work to realize that. Microplastics are by definition pieces of any plastic with a size less than 5 millimetres. What happens is that when the string hits something more solid (like the metal blade in the back of cover that keeps it all the same length or a garden fence) it breaks into pieces and obviously those are not collected by you or anyone else afterwards. Instead they fall down in the grass and the ground remaining there. Note: Microplastics are considered harmful for the environment and ecosystems. Due to the food chain, even when it was only consumed by organisms in your garden it might ends up in your or someone else’s food or water.

I came across this while looking around for something nice to write about on YouTube. There I came across a video talking trying to figure out how string trimmers work, which turned out to be really interesting. Interesting in particular are scenes like this one where you can see the string breaking and being torn apart into more than 20 pieces after a first quick count.