There’s an enormous amount of plastic in your tap water, but don’t worry. It’s also in basically everything else you eat and drink.
On Tuesday, the Guardian shared findings from scientific research company Orb Media, who analyzed drinking water samples from more than a dozen countries and discovered that 83% of them contained plastic fibres. Yippee. On Friday, they hit us with the upper cut, revealing that plastic has infiltrated our diets in all sorts of ways that drinking out of yet more plastic bottles won’t solve:
“Not only are plastics pervasive in our society in terms of daily use, but they are pervasive in the environment,” said Sherri Mason, a professor at the State University of New York at Fredonia, who lead the latest research into plastic contamination in salt. Plastics are “ubiquitous, in the air, water, the seafood we eat, the beer we drink, the salt we use – plastics are just everywhere.”
That’s some harsh news to read as I sip my plastic coffee. If you want to move to a country where you are slightly less likely to collect microfibers of old Coke bottles in your colon, try the UK, Germany or France, which al have a contamination rate of about 72% in their tap water. That sounds high, but the US has a contamination rate of 94%, with samples somewhat pointedly taken from “Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, and Trump Tower in New York.”
The majority of these fibers are likely coming from single-use bottles, so if you want to do something good for the environment, keep chugging that contaminated stuff to get it out of circulation, instead of buying filtered Deer Park and tossing the container.