Scientists discover 100 to 1000 times more plastics in bottled water
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Finding a connection between microplastics and health problems in humans is complicated — there are thousands of types of plastics, and over 10,000 chemicals used to manufacture them. But at a certain point, Mason said, policymakers and the public need to prepare for the possibility that the tiny plastics in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the clothes we wear have serious and dangerous effects.
If the negative effects were very strong they would probably have found evidence in previous studies. There may be something here, but it isn't something worth worrying about much.
Sometimes problems have such a broad scope that the impacts are normative across samples and analysis is very difficult.
For example, we know something is at fault for why developed nations have such high and growing autoimmune diseases compared to less developed nations. But specifically what the culprit is eludes us.
An argument from silence isn't a very compelling argument for the safety of microplastics.
True, but how many other things were hypothesized to be harmful, and turned out harmless? Can we even know the difference between the two beforehand?
In order to worry about something, you need evidence of harm. If you worry without evidence, you worry about everything.
Putting that aside... I wonder if researchers looking for damage from leaded gasoline for those decades? We have been using these types of plastic for a very long time.
> "Previous studies found the major chemical composition to be PET, which is expected since the bottle is made of PET," Yan told us. "Therefore, for a long time, we had the impression that the majority of plastic particles inside bottled water would be Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) particles of a few hundred nanometers in size." > "That was incorrect," Yan said.
> Ironically enough, the most commonly detected plastic was polyamide, a material commonly used in water filtration systems and "the most popular membrane material used in reverse osmosis … a common water purification method shared by all three brands [of water tested]," the team wrote in the paper.
Too different from the title. And the other comments seem to have been written without reading the text.
Nanoplastic from PET bottles, in animal tests, show it goes into the brain. German language article.
And, in Germany, there don't seem to be any 1L or 1.5L bottles, only 0.7L.
I drink 3-4L a day sometimes even 5. That's 6 bottles of 12 just for me.
And what micro-nano stuff is in those glas bottles? And what effect does it have on our bodies?
I've been drinking bottled water all my life. I could imagine some circulatory health effects. Or it's too small to matter.
In any case we're infested with plastic.
Regarding what someone wrote about developed vs undeveloped countries health, we eat food with very little nutrients. There's this story about 1 or 2 Indian women coming to the UK, and developing nutrient deficiencies because the food in India, what they were used to, was normal, but the food in the UK was watered down, glasshouse mass produced crap that never even saw daylight and was full of chemicals. And it's not just the UK.
Was told that "tap water is for broke people"
To your point though, there was an issue with lead in schools and in NYCHA that may be at play here.
I recall reading some story about a German traveler some century and more ago who was visiting London and was amazed by how people were tricked into buying bottled water when there was perfectly good tap water available at the turn of a knob.
I dont want to doubt you but from my own experience that seems insane. Is there a medical/enviromental reason for? Do you take salt tablets as well?
I drink a single glass of water in the morning, 200ml and I have a .7L glass bottle because I dislike the way plastic tastes. But thats a hard maximum that I could tolerate drinking.
I've also had blood tests done that do not show any dehydration in the slightest so I'm just curious why/how anyone could drink that much water without poisoning themselves.
On the other hand, I've never seen water in cartons in my life.
But both cans and cartons are also lined with plastic on the inside, afaik.
I was seeing "When Chinese Industrial Espionage Goes Wrong" [1] some months age, industrial espionage related to the inside coatings of the cans. Quite interesting video.
It's also one of the things that the beverage can manufacturing industry tests for. All aluminum beverage cans are tested optically to detect and reject individual cans with holes in the metal that light can penetrate, and spot tests are also done using brine and electricity to detect metal exposure due to an incomplete plastic coating inside of the can (which can result in cans being rejected in batches of tens-of-thousands at once).
(Given all of this, maybe we had it closer right with the returnable, reusable glass bottles that were previously used by the soda industry.)
no idea if it's still a thing or not though.
I still think it's too expensive though.
their whole thing is drinks. in cans.
No idea how they did it, but mad props to them for somehow managing to make it this far on just water, and without backing of some other major beverage megacorp (like Coke or Pepsico), at least to my knowledge.
I'd say they're the Limp Biskit of beverage companies. They are all in on the stereotype, without shame, while simultaneously making fun of themselves for it.
I have next to zero idea what the appeal is but it really seems popular to be cruising around with water in a PET bottle.
I've used a re-usable double wall "Yeti" bottle for years and years, it's 100x superior to a plastic bottle, but yeah, the plastic bottles still win in popularity. I know of whole families who only drink out of PET bottles at home, ie they won't drink tap water, only from PET bottles. They go through tens of them a week.
Anyway my point is, I bet this news will have almost no effect on bottled water sales.
You can also get water in tetra pack paper containers. Again, I mostly see these at events where there is some reason to brand the water in an ecological fashion (had a pack that was imported from Norway to Dubai for cop28. I could really taste the sustainability in that one!)
https://bioplasticsnews.com/2020/07/22/cans-sustainable-plas....
plastics also photodegrade (instead of biodegrade), so putting that bad boy in direct sun may not only help grow algae (I'm on well water and filtering won't stop that) in there but also break the plastic down into your water.
if you're serious about filtering look into in-line reverse osmosis systems.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8563659/#:~:tex....
Once it gets down to a certain size, micro-plastic won't be filtered.
So basically, and for clarity, my understanding is that microplastics get down to 1 μm, which is like .001mm and the standard Brita does something down to .005mm, so it can’t catch the smallest microplastics, but I assume it will help.
I distinctly remember the water bottle in the Goonies being glass.
There is so much plastic in food packaging it’s getting kinda hard to avoid.
So after a while I realized I could just put the entire in-house system through charcoal systems at the supply side (we lucked out and had a supply line for just the home available instead of just one mains — the builder split the lines and exposed the home one in the garage just for this use case so I lucked out) so I bought a canister carbon filter and a pre-filter and put it in.
I change it about once a year and our water has been amazing. Every tap has super clean water coming out of it. I know this might not work everywhere but it’s been fantastic for us.
The new study found pieces of PET (polyethylene terephthalate), which is what most plastic water bottles are made of, and polyamide, a type of plastic that is present in water filters. The researchers hypothesized that this means plastic is getting into the water both from the bottle and from the filtration process.