Bottled Water Contains Hundreds of Thousands of Plastic Particles Small Enough to Invade Human Cells, Study Finds

Microplastics are so pervasive, they have been found all over the planet and in the human body.

A new study has found that a liter of bottled water contains an average of approximately 240,000 detectable plastic fragments, which is 10 to 100 times more than earlier estimates, a press release from Columbia Climate School said.

Plastics that begin as textiles, packaging, fishing nets and other applications break down into smaller and smaller particles that make their way into the soil, air and water, and are ingested by humans and other species. Microplastics are less than five millimeters long, while the even tinier and less-studied nanoplastics are less than a micron — one-thousandth of a millimeter in size.

“Plastics are now omnipresent in our daily lives. The existence of microplastics (1 µm to 5 mm in length) and possibly even nanoplastics (<1 μm) has recently raised…