Plastic bottled water contains 100 times more plastic particles than previously thought
Abbas Ganbay
Read moreResearchers have found that a 1-litre bottle of water can contain an average of 240,000 plastic particles, Azernews reports.
Bloomberg notes that the danger of nanoplastic lies in its ability, due to its tiny size to get into human cells and blood, including through the placenta - and into the body of newborns.
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 less than 1 micrometre long, which is one-seventieth the width of a human hair.
The results show that bottled water may contain 100 times more plastic particles than previously thought, as previous studies have only considered microplastics, or particles between 1 and 5,000 micrometres in size.
Nanoplastics pose a greater threat to human health than microplastics because they are small enough to penetrate human cells, enter the bloodstream and damage organs.
Nanoplastics can also enter unborn babies through the placenta. Scientists have long suspected their presence in bottled water but lacked the technology to identify individual nanoparticles.
To solve this problem, the study's co-authors invented a new microscopy method, programmed a data-driven algorithm, and used both techniques to analyse about 25 litres of bottled water bought from three popular brands in the US. ( The researchers declined to specify which brands.) In each litre, they found between 110,000 and 370,000 tiny plastic particles, 90 per cent of which were nanoplastic.
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