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Comment by stevanl | Hacker News Reader

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

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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?

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