YAHOO! – At this point, the dangers of single-use plastic are well-documented, but Phys.org recently reported that an expert believes water bottle-related risks to human health remain “dangerously understudied.”
What’s happening?
Sarah Sajedi devoted her career to addressing plastic waste after a visit to Thailand’s Phi Phi Islands, where she noticed an immense amount of debris on its shores.
“I was standing there looking out at this gorgeous view of the Andaman Sea, and then I looked down and beneath my feet were all these pieces of plastic, most of them water bottles,” she recalled.
Sajedi immediately focused on consumption as the core of the problem, and the risks associated with single-use water bottles were the focus of her recent study, published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials.
In the paper’s abstract, Sajedi and her co-authors emphasized that plastic water bottles have become “ubiquitous” worldwide, highlighting a growing body of research on the adverse effects of nanoplastics and microplastics on human health.
The authors reviewed 141 scientific articles to gather information about the scope of microplastic ingestion and associated health outcomes. Their findings were striking.
Across dozens of studies, Sajedi and her co-authors found that the average person might ingest between 39,000 and 52,000 plastic particles each year, “with bottled water consumers ingesting up to 90,000 more particles than tap water consumers.”
The conclusion Sajedi drew from their robust review of the data was equally concerning.
“Drinking water from plastic bottles is fine in an emergency, but it is not something that should be used in daily life … ”
