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Forever Chemicals and Microplastics in Water More Dangerous to Health Than Thought
The chemicals are everywhere, but their danger is now more severe than previously thought and presents an explicit threat to health.
The refreshing glass of cold water from your home, school, or work tap may hold dangers you have never envisioned. Once you understand the current state of PFAS entrance into the system, you may never again be as casual about your water consumption.
We already know about the microplastics that have been found everywhere, including the rivers, lakes, and the deep oceans, and our bodies' blood. It is inescapable at this time, but the PFAS chemicals may be something that can be controlled in some manner.
For anyone continuing to use bottled water in the belief that it is safer than water from your tap, there is research that can be a bit unsettling. A liter of bottled water had an average of 240,000 microplastic particles, with over 90% of those particles being nanoplastics, according to a study. Previous research had largely concentrated on bigger microplastics, therefore this amount represented a tenfold to one hundredfold increase.
The potential damage has been ongoing for the last half century or so. Some of the health damage begins through our constant dependence on plastics—that “miracle” product of the 1940s that has become so entrenched in our lives that we can’t seem to exist without it. Discarded and broken down consumer goods such as single-use plastic bottles, food packaging, and plastic pellets — tiny bits of plastic utilized to create packaging, automotive components, toys, and other things — give rise to microplastics, which are defined as fragments of plastic shorter than 5 millimeters in length.
Microplastics end up in human water sources because of ocean dumping and landfills. These bits also make it into the air when plastic-filled bubbles burst at the surface of the ocean, according to the World Health Organization, and into lakes, rivers, and estuaries. They have even found microplastic in the breath of dolphins. And micro plastics may also bring on climate change as we are now discovering. Clouds may form in environments where they would not generally due to microplastics in the air, which could have an impact on the weather and…
