Plastic Bottled Water Can Cause Cancer, New Report Says

According to recent studies, there are hundreds of thousands of hazardous microscopic plastic particles present in plastic water bottles.

If you drink water from a bottle, you may be introducing small particles of plastic into your body, which scientists worry could build up in your key organs and have unknown health effects. Prior research has connected nanoplastics to birth abnormalities, cancer, and infertility issues.

Using the most sophisticated laser scanning methods, scientists discovered that a one-litre bottle of water contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles, as opposed to 5.5 in a litre of tap water.

Researchers from the University of Columbia examined three well-known brands of bottled water that are sold in the US and used lasers to examine the plastic particles, which can have a size as small as 100 nanometers.

These minuscule particles include phthalate compounds, which provide plastics with increased flexibility, durability, and extended shelf life.

In the US, phthalate exposure is thought to be the cause of 100,000 premature deaths annually. It is well known that the chemicals cause problems for the body’s hormone production.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences states that they are ‘associated with developmental, reproductive, neurological, immunological, and other disorders’.

370,000 particles were discovered in the highest estimates.

Conventional methods, which could only locate microplastics ranging from 5mm down to 1 micrometre—a millionth of a metre, or 1/25,000th of an inch—had proven too difficult to use for the detection of nanoplastics.

A litre of bottled water was discovered to contain about 300 microplastic particles in a groundbreaking 2018 study, but the researchers’ detection methods at the time were constrained.

Global research is currently being conducted to evaluate the possible negative consequences.

One of the co-authors of the paper recently pioneered Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) microscopy, which was used by the team.

The technique uses two lasers that are calibrated to resonate with particular molecules to probe bottles; a computer algorithm then determines the origin of the resonances.

Ninety per cent of these molecules were nanoparticles, according to the data, and ten per cent were microplastics.

Professor Beizhan Yan, an environmental chemist at Columbia University and co-author of the study, stated: “This was not surprising, since that is what many water bottles are made of.”

He continued: “PET is also used for bottled sodas, sports drinks, and products such as ketchup and mayonnaise.

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

Polyamide, a kind of nylon, was another plastic particle—one that outnumbered PET—that was discovered within water bottles.

Ironically, this most likely results from plastic filters that are meant to filter the water before it is bottled, according to Professor Yan.

Polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and polymethyl methacrylate were among the other often discovered plastics. These materials are utilised in a variety of industrial operations.