At this point, it’s common knowledge that bottled water contains microplastics — fragments of the insidious material that can be as small as a bacterial cell. But the problem is much worse than previously known: It turns out that bottled water harbors hundreds of thousands of even tinier pieces of the stuff.
A paper published Monday used a novel technique to analyze one-liter samples of bottled water for plastic granules, going down to just 50 to 100 nanometers in length — roughly the width of a virus. They found nearly a quarter of a million of these tiny particles per liter, about 10 to 100 times more than previously published estimates.
“We’ve opened up a whole new world,” Wei Min, one of the paper’s authors and a chemistry professor at Columbia University, told Grist. Until now, scientists lacked a quick and efficient way to…