Synthetic Polymer Contamination in Bottled Water

By S. Mason, Victoria G. Welch, Joseph Neratko. Frontiers in Chemistry, 2018

873 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Eleven globally sourced brands of bottled water, purchased in 19 locations in nine different countries, were tested for microplastic contamination using Nile Red tagging. Of the 259 total bottles processed, 93% showed some sign of microplastic contamination. After accounting for possible background (lab) contamination, an average of 10.4 microplastic particles >100 um in size per liter of bottled water processed were found. Fragments were the most common morphology (66%) followed by fibers. Half of these particles were confirmed to be polymeric in nature using FTIR spectroscopy with polypropylene being the most common polymer type (54%), which matches a common plastic used for the manufacture of bottle caps. A small fraction of particles (4%) showed the presence of industrial lubricants. While spectroscopic analysis of particles smaller than 100 um was not possible, the adsorption of the Nile Red dye indicates that these particles are most probably plastic. Including these smaller particles (6.5–100 um), an average of 325 microplastic particles per liter of bottled water was found. Microplastic contamination range of 0 to over 10,000 microplastic particles per liter with 95% of particles being between 6.5 and 100 um in size. Data suggests the contamination is at least partially coming from the packaging and/or the bottling process itself. Given the prevalence of the consumption of bottled water across the globe, the results of this study support the need for further studies on the impacts of micro- and nano- plastics on human health.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ff21e222b851ff39f98802ff20cf230797b83e8

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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Microplastics in freshwaters and drinking water: Critical review and assessment of data quality (2019, methodology): “Recent studies are increasingly using such conditions (Mason et al., 2018; Obmann et al., 2018; Schymanski et al., 2018; Wang et al., 2018; Zhang et al., 2017).”
Effect of microplastics in water and aquatic systems (2021, background): “Presence of microplastics in tap water (Tong et al. 2020), sea salt (Selvam et al. 2020), and bottled water (Mason et al. 2018) are proven studies on how many ways they can reach the human body.”
Impact of Microplastics and Nanoplastics on Human Health (2021, methodology): “While, there are no studies looking specifically at nanoplastic toxicity in humans, there is research showing that microplastics are being ingested through food and drink [36].”