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A team of scientists discovered that single-use plastic water bottles contain 10 to 100 times more plastic than expected. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said that a one-liter bottle of water contains nearly 250,000 nanoplastics.
The microscopic particles were found both in the plastic that makes up the bottles and the water used to fill them.
The nanoplastics are 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair and cannot be seen on a traditional microscope. Study co-author Beizhan Yan of Columbia University told The Hill that the plastic particles are so small they "can cross into the blood, and then can cross the different barriers to get into the cells," potentially "causing them to malfunction."
Nanoplastics are similar to microplastics but are much smaller, making them difficult to study. The study authors wrote that both microplastics and nanoplastics can cause "oxidative stress, inflammation, immune dysfunction, altered biochemical and energy metabolism, impaired cell proliferation, disrupted microbial metabolic pathways, abnormal organ development, and carcinogenicity."
"All of those chemicals are used in the manufacturing of plastic, so if a plastic makes its way into us, it's carrying those chemicals with it. And because the temperature of the body is higher than the outside, those chemicals are going to migrate out of that plastic and end up in our body," Sherri "Sam" Mason, director of sustainability at Penn State Behrend in Erie, Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the study, told CNN. "The chemicals can be carried to your liver and your kidney and your brain and even make their way across the placental boundary and end up in an unborn child."