Microplastic contamination has been found in tap water in countries worldwide, leading to calls from scientists for urgent research on the health implications.
Scores of tap water samples from more than a dozen nations were analyzed by scientists for an investigation by Orb Media, who shared the findings with the Guardian. Overall, 83 percent of the samples were contaminated with plastic fibers.
The US had the highest contamination rate, at 94 percent, with plastic fibers found in tap water sampled at sites including the US Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters and Trump Tower in New York. Lebanon and India had the next-highest rates.
Illustration: Lance Liu
European nations including the UK, Germany and France had the lowest contamination rate, but it was still 72 percent. The average number of fibers found in each 500ml sample ranged from 4.8 in the US to 1.9 in Europe.
The new analyses indicate the ubiquitous extent of microplastic contamination in the global environment. Previous work has been largely focused on plastic pollution in the oceans, which suggests people are eating microplastics via contaminated seafood.
“We have enough data from looking at wildlife, and the impacts that it’s having on wildlife, to be concerned,” said Sherri Mason, a microplastic expert at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who supervised the analyses for Orb. “If it’s impacting [wildlife], then how do we think that it’s not going to somehow impact us?”
A separate small study in the Republic of Ireland released in June also found microplastic contamination in a handful of tap water and well samples.
“We don’t know what the [health] impact is and for that reason we should follow the precautionary principle and put enough effort into it now, immediately, so we can find out what the real risks are,” said Anne Marie Mahon at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, who conducted the research.
Mahon cited two principal concerns: very small plastic particles and the chemicals or pathogens that microplastics can harbor.
“If the fibers are there, it is possible that the nanoparticles are there too, which we can’t measure,” she said. “Once they are in the nanometer range, they can really penetrate a cell and that means they can penetrate organs, and that would be worrying.”
The Orb analyses caught particles of more than 2.5 microns in size, 2,500 times bigger than a nanometer.
Microplastics can attract bacteria found in sewage, Mahon said, adding: “Some studies have shown there are more harmful pathogens on microplastics downstream of wastewater treatment plants.”
Microplastics are also known to contain and absorb toxic chemicals and research on wild animals shows they are released in the body.
“It became clear very early on that the plastic would release those chemicals and that actually, the conditions in the gut would facilitate really quite rapid release,” Plymouth University UK professor Richard Thompson said.
His research has shown that microplastics are found in a third of fish caught in the UK.
The scale of global microplastic contamination is only starting to become clear, with studies in Germany finding fibers and fragments in all of the 24 beer brands they tested, as well as in honey and sugar.
In Paris in 2015, researchers discovered microplastic falling from the air, which they estimated deposits 3 to 10 tonnes of fibers on the city each year.
This research led Frank Kelly, professor of environmental health at King’s College London, to tell a UK parliamentary inquiry last year: “If we breathe them in they could potentially deliver chemicals to the lower parts of our lungs and maybe even across into our circulation.”
Having seen the Orb data, Kelly told the Guardian that research is urgently needed to determine whether ingesting plastic particles is a health risk.
The new research tested 159 samples using a standard technique to eliminate contamination from other sources and was performed at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. The samples came from across the world, including from Uganda, Ecuador and Indonesia.
How microplastics end up in drinking water is for now a mystery, but the atmosphere is one obvious source, with fibers shed by the everyday wear and tear of clothes and carpets. Tumble dryers are another potential source, with almost 80 percent of US households having dryers that usually vent to the open air.
“We really think that the lakes [and other water bodies] can be contaminated by cumulative atmospheric inputs,” said Johnny Gasperi, at the University Paris-Est Creteil, who did the Paris studies. “What we observed in Paris tends to demonstrate that a huge amount of fibers are present in atmospheric fallout.”
Plastic fibers may also be flushed into water systems, with a recent study finding that each cycle of a washing machine could release 700,000 fibers into the environment. Rains could also sweep up microplastic pollution, which could explain why the household wells used in Indonesia were found to be contaminated.
In Beirut, Lebanon, the water supply comes from natural springs, but 94 percent of the samples were contaminated.
“This research only scratches the surface, but it seems to be a very itchy one,” said Hussam Hawwa, at the environmental consultancy Difaf, which collected samples for Orb.
Current standard water treatment systems do not filter out all of the microplastics, Mahon said.
“There is nowhere really where you can say these are being trapped 100 percent,” she said. “In terms of fibers, the diameter is 10 microns across, and it would be very unusual to find that level of filtration in our drinking water systems.”
Bottled water may not provide a microplastic-free alternative to tapwater, as the they were also found in a few samples of commercial bottled water tested in the US for Orb.
Almost 300 million tonnes of plastic are produced each year and, with just 20 percent recycled or incinerated, much of it ends up littering the air, land and sea.
A report in July found 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic has been produced since the 1950s, with the researchers warning that plastic waste has become ubiquitous in the environment.
“We are increasingly smothering ecosystems in plastic and I am very worried that there may be all kinds of unintended, adverse consequences that we will only find out about once it is too late,” said Roland Geyer, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara who led the study.
Mahon said the new tap water analyses raise a red flag but that more work is needed to replicate the results, find the sources of contamination and evaluate the possible health impacts.
She said plastics are very useful, but that management of the waste must be drastically improved.
“We need plastics in our lives, but it is us that is doing the damage by discarding them in very careless ways,” she said.
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