Stapleton said she now relies more on filtered water at her home in New Jersey.
But study co-author Beizhan Yan, a Columbia environmental chemist who increased his tap water usage, pointed out that filters themselves can be a problem by introducing plastics.
I've been saying this to people for a long time. Here in my country, most water filters are based on charcoal and a final filtering element. That element used to be made of cellulose and other organic materials, but in the last decade, they started coming with that element made of polypropylene, until all the cellulose ones disappeared from the market. Just imagine your water passing though a porous layer of plastic, like a rigid sponge... this is a serious microplastic source.
”The International Bottled Water Association said in a statement: “There currently is both a lack of standardised [measuring] methods and no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of nano- and microplastic particles. Therefore, media reports about these particles in drinking water do nothing more than unnecessarily scare consumers.”
Fuck capitalism - "no don't be too cautious, just consume until we can finally prove what tiny particles accumulated in your organs can do. How bad can it be?"
I guess. It seems like it doesn’t matter tho because it’s not just bottled water. It’s literally everything.
All the food you eat. Anything you drink. The air you breathe. The clothes you wear. Literally everything you interact with has some amount of plastic that you’re consuming.
You can put down the bottled water but the alternatives aren’t much better. Either way you’re being bombarded by microplastics.
Oh, How I long for the olden days...
I would literally die for a fresh glass of water plucked from a local stream.
The copious amounts of lead and mercury combine with the rich abundance of feces, microbacteria and other organic matter, to create a pure, natural live giving elixir.
Now all of that has been removed and replaced with modern plastic. No thanks
Sawyer tap filters remove 100% of microplastics (which I'm really hoping is legit!). They fit right on your tap and other than looking a bit funny work great. Just replaced my Brita filter with one a few weeks ago.
I've seen a lot of reporting on finding microplastics in new places and new quantities, but is there reliable evidence that it actually does damage? Genuinely asking, can someone please send me the papers?
I think it's still a bit early for us to know how it's affecting us. It's the kind of data that takes a lifetime of micro plastics to see how it will kill us.
But knowing how much cancer various plastics already give us, it's safe to assume this is a bad thing.
This isn't like smoking or drinking. There isn't any control group. We have no population to compare a lifetime of microplastic exposure against. It isn't like lead, either. Plastics pollution to date guarantees a continuous supply of microplastics for decades/centuries.