Water bottles with 370,000 particles of nanoplastics

BOTTLES of water contain hundreds of thousands more plastic particles than was previously believed.

US research suggests drinking water from the bottle could contaminate your body with potentially toxic plastic.

Using the most advanced laser scanning techniques, scientists found an average of 240,000 particles of plastic in a one-litre plastic bottle of water – thousands of times more than had been previously found. The highest estimates found 370,000 particles. University of Columbia researchers tested three popular brands of bottled water sold in the US and analysed the plastic particles they contained down to just 100 nanometres in size.

The particles – nanoplastics – are much smaller than the microplastics previously detected in bottled water. But nanoplastics are potentially toxic because they can enter into blood cells and the brain. Microplastics range from 5mm to one micrometre – a millionth of a metre – while nanoplastics are less than one micrometre wide. Research is under way to assess the potentially harmful effects of nanoplastics.

Groundbreaking research in 2018 found around 300 microplastic particles in a litre of bottled water, but scientists were limited by measurement techniques at the time.

One common nanoplastic found was polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. Study co-author Professor Beizhan Yan, an environmental chemist at Columbia, said: ‘This was not surprising, since that is what many water bottles are made of.

‘It probably gets into the water as bits slough off when the bottle is squeezed or gets exposed to heat.’