Your Bottled Water Probably Has Plastic In It. Should You Worry?

Plastic contamination is rampant in bottled water. That was the unsettling conclusion of a study published last year in Frontiers in Chemistry that analyzed samples taken from 259 bottled waters sold in several countries and found that 93% of them contained “microplastic” synthetic polymer particles. Many of those particles weren’t all that small. “Some were definitely visible without a magnifying glass or microscope,” says Sherri Mason, author of the study and a sustainability researcher at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. The 11 bottled water brands tested in Mason’s study are among the most popular and widely available in the U.S. and around the world. Samples from the brands tested varied in plastic concentrations, and the average across brands was 325 microplastic particles per liter of bottled water, researchers found. Nestlé Pure Life had the largest average concentration of plastic particles out of all the brands tested; one sample from the brand was found to contain more than 10,000 microplastic particles per liter. Mason’s findings generated headlines and a World Health Organization announcement that the group plans to investigate the safety of bottled water. (The results of that review should be published later this year, according to a WHO spokesperson.) But Mason says the problem of microplastic contamination is far bigger than bottled H2O. “These plastic particles are in our air, in our water and in ou...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized public health Source Type: news