Are you drinking plastics from your water bottle?

When you’re out and about, quenching your thirst by drinking from a plastic bottle of packaged drinking water can seem commonplace. However, did you know that the seemingly clean and crystal-clear drinking water bottle holding a liter of water can have 110,000 to 370,000 plastic particles? Of this, 90% are nanoplastics, while the rest are microplastics, a new study has found. The study, conducted by researchers at the Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University and Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2024. It analyzed samples from three popular brands of bottled water from the United States and revealed that on an average, one liter of bottled water contained 240,000 detectable plastic particles, of which 90% are nanoplastics. According to the researchers, this is 10 to 100 times greater than previous estimates.