Bottle of water contains 240,000 bits of plastic

A BOTTLE of water can contain a quarter of a million pieces of plastic, a study has found.

Scientists have found a new category of plastic pollution called nanoparticles, which are created when microplastics break down even further.

It had previously been impossible to tell how many particles smaller than one micron, one seventieth of the width of a human hair, are in water owing to analytical restrictions. However, a technique developed by Columbia University has shown that the amount of plastic in water is up to 100 times more than previously thought.

A litre of bottled water contains 240,000 detectable plastic shards, data show, with the number possibly being as high as 370,000.

Nine in 10 of the plastics are nanoplastics and therefore smaller than one micrometre – or 1/25,000th of an inch. A 2018 study found there to be 325 nanoparticles per litre, but this estimate has since been revised upwards.

The scientists studied PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, which is the material used to make plastic bottles. It is thought that tiny pieces of the material break away during use and get into the water as the bottles degrade.

Naixin Qian, a Columbia graduate student in chemistry who was lead author of the study, said: “It is not totally unexpected to find so much of this stuff.

The idea is that the smaller things get, the more of them there are.”

Wei Min, a Columbia biophysicist who invented the technique used to analyse plastic pollution, added: “The smaller things are, the more easily they can get inside us.”

The health implications of plastic pollution in food and drink remain relatively unknown and is hard to study but plastics have been found in organ tissue, bloodstreams as well as in the tissue of plants and animals that we eat.

The team now hopes to study tap water to record the level of pollution, as well as wastewater from laundry.

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.