One liter of bottled water found to contain 240k plastic fragments | Hacker News Reader

One liter of bottled water found to contain 240k plastic fragments

newatlas.com

27 pointshochmartinez25 comments

I was looking for some context between bottled and tap water and found this. Any better sources?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9103198/

"Somewhat concerningly, the seven plastics tested accounted for only about 10% of all the nanoplastics the researchers found in the bottled water. They had no idea what the others were and whether they are, in fact, nanoplastics."

Eh? I'm far too much of an ignoramus to make sense of the original paper, but this is a pretty weird claim.

I do know that 10^5 nanoparticles per liter is an incredibly tiny amount of mass. Assuming an average particle size of 200nm, by my reckoning that would make the water 0.00000000004% plastic, which doesn't seem all that worrying.

If it was like dust or sand it would be 1000x mass and size but 0 issue. Small size is the problem here.

Micro means it crosses directly into tissue and nano means it gets into individual cells and screws up their business. Want to put a number on how much plastic are you OK to accumulate in your lungs/testes/placenta/blood/breast milk/brain?

Does it accumulate or is it just a constant low concentration of plastic passing through the body?

A comparison with municipal water should have been done alongside.

"Next, the researchers plan to look beyond bottled water to other potential sources of nanoplastics, including tap water."

Hopefully it will be sooner rather than later.

I imagine the results will be of no surprise to anyone - both sources contain an unacceptable level of some form of plastics.

Additionally, perhaps prompting better processing of all water source used for drinking, and potentially kill bottled water, or at the very least significantly reduce the cost of it - unless the industry manages to find some new spin for bottled water to justify its price and stay in the game.

Bottled water is an incredible thing, why would we kill it instead of making the bottles of different materials?

Even if the material was changed, shipping bottled water is a massive waste or resources and has very few actual upsides. Tap water just is the better choice in most circumstances.

In the US, yes. Elsewhere, not so much. Tap water is not safe in much of the world.

The article left me with a lot of questions. What does "bottled" water even mean? Is it bottled in PET or glass? "Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) was common, which is not unusual as it’s what many water bottles are made of". Right but what about the samples in question?

Also "microplastics are showing up literally everywhere on Earth – from the bottom of oceans to the top of mountains". But what about deep fountains, where the mineral water we drink at home is gathered? Maybe the 40m of soil filters the particles, maybe not.

The smaller the pieces get, the more of them (for the same mass). So a title like this makes it hard to gauge of that's a lot of plastic or the problem is that the pieces are very small and whether that's the reason it's a problem (presumably because they pass through some membranes?).

Does anyone know if distilling water would remove these plastic particles, or if they’re small enough to to travel up with water vapour?

I know that Reverse osmosis membranes are able to prevent these from passing. That's what I installed at home for drinking water for this exact problem.

You're likely thinking of microplastics not nanoplastics. RO is actually suspected of ADDING nanoplastics

>In what the researchers called an ironic finding, they also found plastic compounds in the water that matched the primary material in reverse-osmosis filters — suggesting that the plastics had leached into the water by the very process of filtration

https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/439572...

Thanks for the link. That's interesting to me. I was not confused about nano vs micro plastic. In my research before installing, I see the membrane size is about 1/10th that of nanoplastic size, hence thought it would remove them. For microplastic most non-RO filters can already remove them.

So what does that leave us with to filter water absolutely safely? Distillation? Are there any commercial or consumer systems that can do that in an easy and convenient package?

>So what does that leave us with to filter water absolutely safely? Distillation?

No idea. Wouldn't be surprised if even distillation doesn't do the trick...i.e. carries the particles with it

I think best plan is just to minimize plastic use as much as possible.

The only alternative to RO/Distillation in purity I can think of is collecting rainwater. Im still going to use RO. For the volumes of water I use and without a rainwater collection system that doesn't use plastic pipes it's the best I can do.

While it may introduce nanoplastic it also removes it from the source water so depending on the numbers it may still be better

Water evaporates at temperatures above its freezing point, so distillation will separate the water by way of evaporation. I think heating to produce steam just speeds up that process.

Plastics can potentially leech into other materials they come into contact with, so I'm not 100% certain they would not chemically combine with water and be distilled with the water.

I suspect some sort of substance could be used to bind to or otherwise attract those chemicals from the plastics could be used to allow only water to evaporate. Charcoal etc perhaps?

We’re all going to turn into mannequins and eventually die and when we’re cremated give off black toxic smoke.

And they're essentially inert.

inert to what? your body has to deal with processing all kinds of toxic crap in our environment especially when you ingest it or breathe it in. the amount of people in denial or just now realizing plastic is toxic to humans and animals is mind-boggling. phthalates (in almost all plastics) and BPA (not just BPA but all bisphenols) have been known for years to be endocrine disrupting. the news about plastic and health effects is only going to get worse.

from an article cited in another comment: "The mere presence of objects this size is potentially disruptive to the body, because even if they are chemically inert, they are small enough to get into and disrupt cells, rather like sand in an engine."

As I understand it, this is how asbestos causes cancer. So I too would worry about objects this small, even if chemically inert.

phthalates (in almost all plastics)

Polyethyelene, the most widely produced plastic, does not contain phthalates nor need other plasticisers.

the amount of people in denial or just now realizing plastic is toxic to humans and animals is mind-boggling.

"That's just your opinion," as the saying goes. Truth goes out the window whenever there's an ideological battle of control fueled by ignorant "environmentalists" producing numerous p-hacked crap studies and spreading "plastics = bad" propaganda. Not all plastics are the same, and the mostly widely used ones are certainly not "toxic".

We're certainly in a post-truth world. I wouldn't believe this "news" especially if it's from the MSM.

This subject is very confusing. What are the sizes of plastic fragments that can be filtered? Does home reverse osmosis help or makes city water worse? Is it safe to use reusable plastic bottles, like the ones people carry in the gym?

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