Health Bottled water contains up to 100 times more plastic than previously estimated, new study says

[tom_mai78101]

Bottled water contains up to 100 times more tiny pieces of plastic than was previously estimated, scientists said.

The average liter of bottled water contains around 240,000 detectable plastic fragments, researchers wrote in a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They were able to find microscopic bits of plastic, called nanoplastics, by probing samples with lasers that were tuned to make specific molecules resonate.

Scientists have known for years that there's plastic in water. A 2018 study detected an average of around 300 particles of plastic per liter of water.

At the time, they were measuring microplastics — small plastic pieces less than 5 millimeters long.

In the latest study, researchers examined nanoplastics, which are particles less than 1 micrometer. For reference, the diameter of a human hair is about 70 micrometers.

With the new capacities to study nanoplastics, scientists found that the amount of plastic fragments in bottled water is about 10 to 100 times more than was previously discovered.

Bottled water contains up to 100 times more plastic than previously estimated, new study says

A new study by researchers at Columbia and Rutgers shows that the average liter of bottled water contains nearly a quarter million pieces of nanoplastic.

www.cbsnews.com

 

[The Helper]

Bottled Water Industry Says Please Disregard This Horrifying Discovery About Our Product

Earlier this week, a disturbing study found that a one-liter water bottle contains hundreds of thousands of "nanoplastic" particles.

They're so small — measured on a scale down to a billionth of a meter — that they can enter human cells, a possibility that has alarmed scientists.

These tiny compounds, which are significantly smaller than microplastics, "can cross into the blood, and then can cross the different barriers to get into the cells," as Columbia University's Beizhan Yan, coauthor of a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences told The Hill, which could cause them to "malfunction."

The findings build on a wealth of recent research showing that our planet is increasingly inundated with tiny particles of plastic, from the Marianas Trench to the heights of Mount Everest — not to mention clouds and inside human organs.

Now the bottled water industry has cried foul, claiming it's totally fine we're all ingesting these nanoplastics and that the Columbia team's research is nothing more than fearmongering.

"Media reports about these particles in drinking water do nothing more than unnecessarily scare consumers," the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) wrote in a statement.

Bottled Water Industry Says Please Disregard This Horrifying Discovery About Our Product

Earlier this week, a disturbing study found that a one-liter water bottle contains around a million "nanoplastic" particles. They're so small — measured on a scale down to a billionth of a meter — that they can enter human cells, a possibility that has alarmed scientists. These tiny compounds...

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