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.
One liter 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% were identified as nanoplastics and the rest were microplastics, according to the new 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.
In the new study, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from Columbia University presented a new technology that can see, count and analyze the chemical structure of nanoparticles in bottled water.
Instead of 300 per liter, the team behind the latest study found the actual number of plastic bits in three popular brands of water sold in the United States to be in between 110,000 and 370,000, if not higher. (The authors declined to mention which brands of bottled water they studied.)
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