A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in January was used in a media wave of scaremongering about plastic residues in bottled water. Its findings are based on a system developed by researchers at Columbia University and Rutgers University that uses a “hyperspectrally stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) imaging platform with an automated plastic identification algorithm that enables micro-nano analysis of plastic”. It sounds impressive, and it really is, relying on an immersive tank, lasers and advanced computational techniques.
The study’s main contribution to science was actually not to provide an estimate of the amount of plastic in bottled water, but to invent a technique that can detect the presence of nanoplastics. Nanoplastics, as the name suggests, are much smaller than the already tiny microplastics. Microplastics can be as small as a micron in size, 1/83 the width of a strand of hair.
The smallest particles collected by the researchers measured 100 nanometers. This means we can now detect plastic fragments so small that 10 million of them would be equivalent to one piece of microplastic, a fraction of the width of a hair.
Just as a more powerful telescope will discover more planets, or a better microscope might tell us that there are more bacteria in a Petri dish than we previously knew, so too has this impressive new ability to see infinitesimally small bits of plastic meant that they have discovered a seemingly infinite amount of plastic on a planet.
Nearly every media outlet worried thirsty Americans with headlines like “Scientists Find About a Quarter Million Invisible Nanoplastic Particles in a Gallon of Bottled Water” (Associated Press) and “Bottled Water Contains Hundreds of Thousands of potentially dangerous plastic fragments: study” (The hill), as if the figure of 240,000 were directly significant to their readers.
The number of pieces of plastic, as opposed to the quantity of plastic, is irrelevant to the danger (if the danger exists), but the goal was to communicate fear of all the tiny bits of toxicity released onto our liquids. bodies. It’s like pretending that disclosing that we consume more than 30,000 grams of meat per year versus the equivalent of 66 pounds is actually informative about our colorectal risk from consuming beef. The number of discrete units on any arbitrary scale is not what matters to our health risk; is the total weight.
To be clear, the PNAS paper didn’t just convert microplastic units into nanoplastic units. The techniques have allowed more plastic to be detected in the water, but the implications of this have been played up in the media in the most terrible way possible. THE Washington Send the headline referred to “100 to 1000 times more plastic.” The article’s subtitle reads: “New study finds that ‘nanoplastics’ are even more common than microplastics in bottled water.” In that article we are told: “People are swallowing hundreds of thousands of microscopic pieces of plastic every time they drink a liter of bottled water, scientists have shown, a revelation that could have profound implications for human health.”
Emphasis on “could.” There are no valid studies on what the effects of these particles are. Most media outlets that have covered the discovery of nanoplastic reveal that there has never been a documented health effect on the particles, but still can’t resist giving the discovery maximum alarm.
Every person breathes, and has breathed since the dawn of time, nanoparticles. They are decaying skin, leaves and ash. Plastic is different, of course, and this is precisely what current studies are dealing with. We know that bottled water contains small fragments of plastic, the oceans contain small fragments of plastic, and our tap water contains small fragments of plastic.
What we don’t know is how all this plastic may or may not affect us. The panic that is imposed on us by almost all the media is premature and in many cases antithetical to the real processes of scientific investigation. A headline like Earth.com’s “Over 240,000 Carcinogenic Nanoplastics Found in Bottled Water” is not only quantitatively illegible, it’s a claim not based on any evidence of carcinogenic effect. Likewise, a recent article in The New Yorker titled “How Plastics Are Poisoning Us” is interesting, it taught me things I didn’t know about small plastics and “nurdles” and piqued my interest in further research, but what it didn’t do was present any evidence that plastic is poisoning us.
The same scientists behind the study said they personally reduced the amount of water they drank from bottles. Columbia’s Wei Min claimed to have cut his bottled water consumption in half.
Halfway? I doubt lung cancer researchers have cut their smoking in half. Did Herbert Needleman, the researcher who demonstrated the effects of lead on child development, react by painting the walls of his son’s bedroom with just one coat of lead paint instead of two? Nanoplastic chemists are showing appropriate caution, but their continued use of a certain level of bottled water refutes the most alarming claims related to their work.
An example of the correct perspective appeared in an Associated Press article that quoted Denise Hardesty, an Australian government oceanographer who studies plastic waste. She pointed out that the total weight of nanoplastics found in a water bottle is “equivalent to the weight of a single penny in the volume of two Olympic-sized swimming pools.”
I once swallowed a penny. I lived. We’ve all gulped down a lot of water, bottled, tap water and maybe even swimming pools. All this water will contain infinitesimally small pieces of plastic that science can now detect and count. The numbers associated with these tiny bits of plastic will be quite large. The conclusions we should draw from these enormous counts are not quite zero, but they are many orders of magnitude less significant than the media panic over nanoplastics we are swimming in.