Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Bottled water contains thousands of nanoplastics so small they can
invade the body’s cells, study says
The world is no longer free from plastic containers, especially plastic
bottles. But those bottles contain tiny plastic particles that came out of the
bottle or broke off the cap. Such tiny plastic particles called microplastics
have been known as a major environmental concern. Microplastics are fragments
of any type of plastic less than five millimeters in length. Nanoplastics are
even smaller than microplastics, ranging from one nanometer to 100 nanometers. For
reference, a human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide. They are so tiny that
they can migrate through the tissues of the digestive tract or lungs to the bloodstream
or invade individual cells and tissues in major organs and even the brain. How
much nanoplastics are contained in a plastic container hadn’t been measured
until recently because of the size. Now, new research found as many as 240,000 particles
of diverse types of plastics, of which 90% were identified as nanoplastics, were
contained in a liter of bottled water. Since many kinds of chemicals are used
to manufacture plastic bottles, when those nanoplastics invade our bodies, they
also carry those chemicals with them. Long-term effects on our health of these
nanoplastics remain to be seen but drinking tap water with a glass seems safer where
running water is safe to drink.
Read the article and learn about these tiny plastic particles that cannot
be seen by a microscope.
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