By:Henrylito D. Tacio
(Published in its print version on August 3-9 2024)
The last time I bought mineral water from plastic bottles in sari-sari stores was about two weeks ago. Now, I am bringing a tin container I bought when I visited the United States last year. I put my drinking water in the said container.
What happened? I had a change of heart when I learned the result of a recent study that analyzed three brands of bottled water in the US. The researchers found a liter contained a quarter of a million pieces of microscopically small plastic.
The overwhelming evidence of the study was reported by Cara Lynn Shultz in People magazine. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“With laser-powered microscopes, researchers analyzed samples from three brands of bottled water and discovered that a liter contained 110,000 to 400,000 pieces of plastic per liter,” Shultz wrote.
That’s an average of about 240,000 miniscule particles of plastic.
According to the study authors, 90% of the plastic pieces were not microplastics, but nanoplastics, which are even smaller than microplastics, and “believed to be more toxic since their smaller size renders them much more amenable, compared to microplastics, to enter the human body,” the study said.
The National Ocean Service of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) describes microplastics (MPs) are plastic debris that are “less than five millimeters in length (or about the size of a pencil eraser).
Nanoplastics (NPs) are too small toe noticed by the human eye. They are more commonly referred to as “plastic particles with a range in diameter from 1 to 100 or 1000 nm (nanometer),” according to the National Library of Medicine.
To put that size in perspective, there are 10 million nanometers in a centimeter.
“The researchers believed the plastic came from the bottle itself, as well as from the filtration system used by the water companies – which is intended to remove pollutants,” Shultz wrote.
Phoebe Stapleton, study co-author and a toxicologist, was quoted as saying by NBC News that the potential health impact is “currently under review. We don’t know if it’s dangerous or how dangerous.”
However, a study published in the National Library of Medicine showed “the results of cellular and animal experiments have shown that microplastics can affect various systems in the human body, including the digestive, respiratory, endocrine, reproductive, and immune systems.”
Plastic bottles were first used commercially in 1947 but it didn’t catch attention because they were expensive to make. In 1973, Engr. Nathaniel Wyeth patented polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles, which could withstand the pressure of carbonated liquids.
When PET was commercially introduced, plastic bottles became popular with both manufacturers and customers because they are lighter, cheaper and easier to transport than glass bottles.
But the biggest advantage of plastic bottles over their glass counterparts is their superior resistance to breakage, in both production and transportation. As a result, the food industry replaced glass bottles with plastic bottles.#
(To be continued next week)
