Bottled water is safe? Research reveals alarming findings

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

water, equivalent to two standard-size bottled waters, contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles. These particles belonged to seven different types of plastics, with 90 per cent identified as nanoplastics and the remaining as microplastics, the details were found in a study, as per a report.

New research has revealed that commercially available bottled water may contain 10 to 100 times more minuscule plastic particles than previously estimated. These particles are so tiny, classified as nanoparticles, that they are invisible under a microscope, CNN reported.

At a size 1,000 times smaller than the average width of a human hair, nanoplastics exhibit the potential to navigate through the tissues of the digestive tract or lungs, gaining access to the bloodstream. This unique ability enables them to disseminate synthetic chemicals, which may carry potential harm, across the body and into cells, as emphasized by experts.

«Previously this was just a dark area, uncharted. Toxicity studies were just guessing what's in there,» said Beizhan Yan, environmental chemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

«This opens a window where we can look into a world that was not exposed to us before.»

They spotted 110,000 to 370,000 particles in each litre, 90 per cent of which were nanoplastics; the rest were microplastics. They also determined the specific plastics — polyethylene terephthalate or PET, polyamide — a type of nylon, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride and polymethyl methacrylate — all used in various industrial processes.

While the plastic types the researchers searched for accounted for only about 10 per cent of all the nanoparticles