According to a wealth of recent scientific literature, microplastics, tiny pieces of debris anywhere from one micrometer to five millimeters in size, are absolutely everywhere in nature. They’ve even seemingly invaded our bodies, with studies finding them inside our arteries, reproductive organs, and brains.
It’s hard to even grapple with everything that exposes you to plastic on a daily basis. And now we’ve got one more: according to a new study published in the aptly-named Journal of Hazardous Materials: Plastics, Griffith University research fellow Xiangyu Liu and his colleagues found that common containers, including those ubiquitous disposable coffee cups, could be releasing vast amounts of microplastics as they heat up — a thing that happens every time a hot beverage is poured into them.
“As the temperature of the liquid inside a container increases, the release of microplastics generally increases too,” Liu noted in an essay about the work for The Conversation.
After conducting an initial meta-analysis of 30 peer-reviewed studies, they found that the “releases [of microplastics] ranged from a few hundred particles to more than eight million particles per liter, depending on the material and study design.”
Then they took matters into their own hands. In an experiment involving 400 coffee cups and liquids at various temperatures ranging from iced (41 degrees Fahrenheit) to hot (140 degrees Fahrenheit), they found that temperature indeed had an immense effect on the amount of microplastics being released.
Leaving the drink to sit for hours appeared to have far less of an effect than the “initial temperature of the liquid when it first hits the plastic.” Paper cups with plastic liners released fewer microplastics than all-plastic cups, they found, regardless of temperature.
The researchers found that drinking just ten ounces of hot coffee out of all-plastic cups could result in the drinker ingesting 363,000 pieces of microplastic particles a year.
While that may sound alarming, there are some important caveats to the findings that should be considered before giving up your morning bodega coffee habit for good. For one, as Liu pointed out in his Conversation essay, we don’t know how long microplastics actually remain in the human body.
Accurately measuring how many of the particles are present in our bodies has proven extremely difficult as well. Case in point, just earlier this week, The Guardian published an investigation casting serious doubt on recent studies about the detection of microplastics throughout the human body. Experts noted that they could be the result of contamination, triggering a major debate over the legitimacy of the findings.
In other words, many of the alarming studies we’ve come across may be false positives, further highlighting how much there still is to learn about microplastics and health.
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