Anthropogenic contamination of tap water, beer, and sea salt

By M. Košuth, S. Mason, E. Wattenberg. PLoS ONE, 2018

1,000 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Plastic pollution has been well documented in natural environments, including the open waters and sediments within lakes and rivers, the open ocean and even the air, but less attention has been paid to synthetic polymers in human consumables. Since multiple toxicity studies indicate risks to human health when plastic particles are ingested, more needs to be known about the presence and abundance of anthropogenic particles in human foods and beverages. This study investigates the presence of anthropogenic particles in 159 samples of globally sourced tap water, 12 brands of Laurentian Great Lakes beer, and 12 brands of commercial sea salt. Of the tap water samples analyzed, 81% were found to contain anthropogenic particles. The majority of these particles were fibers (98.3%) between 0.1–5 mm in length. The range was 0 to 61 particles/L, with an overall mean of 5.45 particles/L. Anthropogenic debris was found in each brand of beer and salt. Of the extracted particles, over 99% were fibers. After adjusting for particles found in lab blanks for both salt and beer, the average number of particles found in beer was 4.05 particles/L with a range of 0 to 14.3 particles/L and the average number of particles found in each brand of salt was 212 particles/kg with a range of 46.7 to 806 particles/kg. Based on consumer guidelines, our results indicate the average person ingests over 5,800 particles of synthetic debris from these three sources annually, with the largest contribution coming from tap water (88%).

Subfields: Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/afe529769a85c487deac641727ce5bcd0ddd2ea9

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In Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

Impact of Microplastics and Nanoplastics on Human Health (2021, background): “Tap water from 159 global sources was tested and 81% were found to contain microplastic particles measuring less than 5 mm [43].”
Microplastics in freshwaters and drinking water: Critical review and assessment of data quality (2019, background): “To date, there is only a limited number of studies that address this issue and they indeed reported the presence of microplastics in tap water and bottled water (Kosuth et al., 2018; Mason et al., 2018; Mintenig et al., 2019b; Schymanski et al., 2018).”
Microplastics in Fish and Shellfish – A Threat to Seafood Safety? (2020, background): “Microplastics (synthetic particles or fibers) have been reported in products like table or sea salt, beer (Iñiguez et al. 2017; Kosuth et al. 2018; Liebezeit and Liebezeit 2014), honey and sugar (Liebezeit and Liebezeit 2013).”
Impacts of Plastic Pollution on Ecosystem Services, Sustainable Development Goals, and Need to Focus on Circular Economy and Policy Interventions (2021, background): “34 plastic particles per liter of water [226].”
Synthetic Polymer Contamination in Bottled Water (2018, background): “Two studies have noted the presence of microplastics within beer (Liebezeit and Liebezeit, 2014; Kosuth et al., 2018).”