Bottled water not safe from micro plastic contamination

The revelation from a new global survey into microplastics in bottled water serves up a bitter irony. What we drink may well be contaminated. Possibly from the bottles themselves.

Advertisements for bottled water tend to play on themes of purity and healthy living. If sales figures are anything to go by, many of us seem to be buying into that. The global industry is worth €119 billion ($147 billion) a y

ear.

But original research and reporting by the global journalism organization Orb Media, and shared with DW, muddies the association. 

The first of its kind on a global scale, the research tested bottled water from 11 brands bought at 19 locations in nine countries around the world for microplastics. The contaminant was identified in 93 percent of samples — in sometimes greatly varying quantities.

In a world where, according to forecasts by online statistics portal Statista, we will be drinking 391 billion liters of bottled water in 2017 — up from 288 billion liters in 2012 — the study begs the question: Is consuming such tiny plastic particles safe?

That's a tough question to answer. Despite the ubiquity of microplastics in the environment, toxicologists are still in the early stages of figuring out their potential threat to human health.

e don't yet know, says Rolf Halden, director of the Center for Environmental Health Engineering at Arizona State University, how many of these particles actually reach our bloodstream.

Many of these plastic particles will be too big to penetrate so deeply into our bodies. But if some were small enough to pass through the gut, "there would be concern about physical invasion of tissue and the chemical load associated with the plastics," Halden told DW.

Of mice and man

Describing microplastic as a "very challenging emerging contaminant," Heather Leslie, Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology expert at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, likens plastics and the chemicals in them to a bowl of spaghetti in which the noodles are the polymer chains, and chemical additives the sauce in between them.

"Depending on the recipe, you can have some chemicals in plastic that are toxic, and in fact a lot of 'substances of very high concern (SVHCs)' are associated with plastic products."

She's also concerned by what is known as particle toxicity. 

"If tiny particles, including plastics, make their way to a tissue in your body, they can cause what's called oxidative stress, which can lead to chronic inflammation." That, in turn, is now understood to play a major role in the onset of a number of chronic diseases, Leslie explains.

Albert Braeuning, a toxicogenomics expert at the German Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), has been analyzing the effect of microplastic on mice. His team fed the animals huge doses of different sized pieces of microplastic for 28 days, and are now studying the effects of these particles on mouse tissues.

"As far as we have proceeded with the analysis of the samples, we have not seen anything adverse yet," he states.

Nonetheless, he stresses that further research is necessary to assess the "human situation."

Compiling a big body of evidence, Leslie says, will be a long process, just as it was with smoking and climate change. "It sometimes takes decades to figure it all out."