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WE all love bottled water, there are some who think it’s fashionable to carry one while many just feel that it’s the safest water to drink.
Well, in a trailblazing new study, researchers have discovered bottled water sold in stores can contain 10 to 100 times more bits of plastic than previously estimated — nanoparticles so infinitesimally tiny they cannot be seen under a microscope.
At 1,000th the average width of a human hair, nanoplastics are so tiny they can migrate through the tissues of the digestive tract or lungs into the bloodstream, distributing potentially harmful synthetic chemicals throughout the body and into cells, the experts say.
One litre of water — the equivalent of two standard-size bottled waters — contained an average of 240 000 plastic particles from seven types of plastics, of which 90 percent were identified as nanoplastics and the rest were microplastics, according to the new study.
Microplastics are polymer fragments that can range from less than 0.2 inch (5 millimetres) down to 1/25,000th of an inch (1 micrometre).
Anything smaller is a nanoplastic that must be measured in billionths of a metre.
“This study, I have to say, is exceedingly impressive. The body of work that they put into this was really quite profound … I would call it ground-breaking,” said Sherri “Sam” Mason, director of sustainability at Penn State Behrend in Erie, Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study.
The new finding reinforces long-held expert advice to drink tap water from glass or stainless steel containers to reduce exposure, Mason said.
That advice extends to other foods and drinks packaged in plastic as well, she added.
In the new study, published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Columbia University presented a new technology that can see, count and analyse the chemical structure of nanoparticles in bottled water.
The new technology was actually able to see millions of nanoparticles in the water, which could be “inorganic nanoparticles, organic particles and some other plastic particles not among the seven major plastic types we studied,” said co-author and environmental chemist Beizhan Yan, an associate research professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
The innovative new techniques presented in the study open the door for further research to better understand the potential risks to human health, said Jane Houlihan, research director for Healthy Babies, Bright Futures. — H-Metro Reporter/CNN
Mathew Masinge
Online Reporter