Date: January 13, 2024Author: Editor, cairnsnews 5 Comments
The peer-reviewed study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to evaluate bottled water for the presence of “nanoplastics” — plastic particles under 1 micrometer in length, or one-seventieth the width of a human hair. The findings show that bottled water could contain up to 100 times more plastic particles than previously estimated, as earlier studies only accounted for microplastics — pieces between 1 and 5,000 micrometers.
Nanoplastics pose a greater threat to human health than microplastics because they’re small enough to penetrate human cells, enter the bloodstream and impact organs. Nanoplastics can also pass through the placenta to the bodies of unborn babies. Scientists have long suspected their presence in bottled water, but lacked the technology to identify individual nanoparticles.
They found 110,000 to 370,000 tiny plastic particles in each liter, 90% of them nanoplastics.
“This study provides a powerful tool to address the challenges in analyzing nanoplastics, which holds the promise to bridge the current knowledge gap on plastic pollution at the nano level,” says Naixin Qian, the study’s lead author and a graduate student of Columbia University in chemistry.
“Previously this was just a dark area, uncharted. Toxicity studies were just guessing what’s in there,” adds Beizhan Yan, the study’s co-author and an environmental chemist at Columbia University. “This opens a window where we can look into a world that was not exposed to us before.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2024/01/09/sustainability/bottled-water-plastic-particles/
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