A new study has found more than 100 million nanoplastics per milliliter in bottled water. Nanoplastics are pieces of plastic with a diameter smaller than 1 μm (micrometer, one thousandth of a millimeter).
An international team of researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Nankai University in China, and Ghent University in Belgium measured the concentration of nanoplastics in four commercially available brands of bottled water in Norway.
The water samples were first filtered through a glass fiber filter membrane, and the water that passed through the membrane was analyzed메이저놀이터. The filter membrane has a pore diameter of 100 nanometers (nm, 100 nm = 1 μm), which can filter out most nanoplastics. However, the analysis found an average of 166 million nanoplastics in one milliliter of sample. Assuming an adult drinks 2 liters of water per day and a child 1 liter per day, that’s 120 trillion and 54 trillion nanoplastics per year, respectively. This is much higher than the levels of microplastics found in previous studies.
“While nanoplastics in commercially available bottled water may be contaminated by the bottles themselves, contamination can also occur at water sources and during product packaging,” the researchers note. The findings were published in the international journal Environmental Science and Technology.