If you haven’t heard about microplastics yet, you may want to listen up: Researchers have now found these tiny, little, often invisible particles in human stool samples — meaning we’re ingesting them. Specifically, things like polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate are now part of the human digestive system.
If it makes any difference, you’re not alone; microplastics were found in fish and marine animals quite some time ago. According to Time, the researchers say that for humans, this is a concern for your digestive and immune system. Unfortunately, it’s hard to escape microplastics as they are showing up everywhere, including bottled water.
Many people believe that grabbing a bottle of water is an oh-so-much-safer choice than simply drawing it out of your tap, but tests of 11 popular bottled water bands showed that only 17 of 259 bottles were free of microscopic particles. The worst offender was Nestle Pure Life, with a whopping 10,390 particles per liter (in comparison, on average, the bottled water tested contained 325 pieces of microplastic per liter).
In response to these findings the World Health Organization vowed to launch a safety review to determine the health risks of consuming microplastic in water. But, while we wait for tests to find out just how damaging these particles are, they continue to pile up in our groundwater, rivers, lakes and oceans — and even in your tap water, as globally, 83 percent of tap water samples tested were found to contain microplastics.
I’ve written many times about how this tragedy came to be, with marine animals and freshwater fish ingesting plastics right along with you. Unfortunately, rather than taking an all-out approach to ending the use of plastics, too many commissions, governments and researchers just keep on doing what they’re doing — “researching.” That means it’s up to you as consumer to do what you can to reduce plastic usage.
Since some of the main sources of invisible plastics are synthetic clothes like fleece, acrylic and polyester, it’s time to choose cotton whenever you can. Of the synthetic clothes you already have, wash them less frequently, and on the gentle cycle when you do. Become part of the solution by also avoiding anything that comes packaged in plastic, and refuse to use plastic carry bags when you come home from the store.
And, bite the bullet and install a whole-house water filter that not only can filter microparticles, but disinfection products put in city water, as well as contaminants often found in well water.