Scientists find bottled water teeming with nano plastics

Bottled water has been found to contain hundreds of thousands of tiny particles of plastic that have not previously been counted, raising questions over the impact on human health.

Bottled water contains 240,000 nanoplastics, study finds

The problem of bottled water contaminated by microplastics, tiny pieces of plastic between 5mm and 1 micrometer small, has been known about for years. However, US scientists have now discovered on average 240,000 even smaller particles – known as nanoplastics – in every litre of bottled water they tested.

Researchers behind the study, which was published in the medical journal PNAS, said they were limiting their use of plastic bottled water, but were not calling on other people to stop. “I’m not really asking people to stop drinking bottled water, because that could lead to huge health issues,” said Dr Beizhan Yan at Columbia University, New York.

Dr Heather Leslie, an independent plastic particles expert, said it was tricky to say if people should stop drinking bottled water due to the new study. “It’s about deciding if it’s right for you,” she said. It was scientifically plausible but unproven that the particles could cause inflammation in our bodies, she said and recommended a precautionary approach.

“Nanoplastic contamination of our drinking water is a case of convenient plastic packaging technology biting us back. By the time the toxicology of nanoplastic exposure at this level is fully elucidated, practically every human body on the planet will have been dealing with it for decades,” she said.

While microplastics go down to 1 micrometer, or 0.001mm, nanoplastics are even smaller than that. To detect them, Yan and his team used a pair of lasers tuned to resonate with the energy in the chemical bonds of plastics.

They looked at three unnamed US brands of bottled water and found tens to hundreds of times more nanoplastic particles than microplastics. They counted between 110,000 and 370,000 nanoplastic particles per litre.

“It’s not just the pure number, but the surprising existence of plastic that we don’t expect to be there. You might guess the particles come from your bottles, but it turns out that that’s only a small fraction. There are a lot of other types of plastic, that come from maybe the source of the water or how the water is processed,” said Wei Min, also at Columbia University.

The material most bottles are made from, polythene terephthalate (PET), was found in the tests. But there were more particles of a type of nylon that ironically may have come from filters designed to purify the water before it is bottled.

Professor Dick Vethaak, senior guest scientist at Utrecht University’s Institute for

Risk Assessment Sciences, said the research helped explain previous studies finding plastic particles in the bloodstream and various organs.

“What does it mean for human health? It is well accepted that nanoplastics are more hazardous than microplastics. However, as yet there is no clear understanding of how plastic particles affect our health or may contribute to diseases,” he said. One Dutch project called Momentum is investigating the potential health effects of plastic particles.

Yan said other studies had found tap water had lower concentrations of microplastics than bottled water, but he now wanted to test tap water to see if the same held true for nanoplastics.

Being dehydrated would be worse than drinking some nanoplastics, said Yan. But if people think bottled water is unsafe, he said they had the right to switch to other sources. “I will avoid bottled waters,” he said.

More than 70 per cent of people in Britain are already using refillable bottles rather than single-use plastic ones, according to the Refill campaign run by the environmental group City to Sea.

The Times