https://news.yahoo.com/scientists-warn-bottled-water-plastic-161207007.html
https://nordot.app/1117486433233355198
Plastic pollution is not only getting bigger by bulk but is becoming increasingly tricky to deal with.
That’s going by findings published in the US, which show bottled water as containing hundreds of thousands of “previously uncounted” tiny bits of plastic – so small they can get inside cells and even be passed from mother to child in the womb.
These so-called nanoplastics can not only pass “directly into the bloodstream,” the Columbia University team said, writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they can “invade individual cells” and “cross through the placenta to the bodies of unborn babies.”
Smaller than the microplastics found in rivers and oceans, the by-product of plastic rubbish being dumped, nanoplastics have for several years been known to occur in bottled water and be ingested by drinkers.
Just how much gets swallowed by had not been quantified, but Columbia’s researchers claim to have used “newly refined technology” to access “a whole new plastic world.”
“For the first time, they counted and identified these minute particles in bottled water,” the university said in a statement, finding that an average liter contains “some 240,000 detectable plastic fragments — 10 to 100 times greater than previous estimates, which were based mainly on larger sizes.”
An estimated 30 million tonnes of plastic are dumped around the world each year. In early January, the activist organisation Basel Action Network said wealthy countries “cannot manage their plastic waste” as it published data showing European Union exports of plastic trash “to non-OECD countries” as having climbed from 28 million in May 2022 to 75 million kilograms a month in October 2023.
Broken-down microplastics, a by-product of this pollution and which cannot be seen by the human eye, have for years been findibg their way into the food chain, often through fish.
