This is why I donate blood. Gotta offload some microplastics.
this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2025
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I don’t know how to judge 90,000 microplastic particles as a quantity.
That's the fun thing about all this. Nobody knows. Is it much? Is it nothing? Is it dangerous? There is no people without microplastics in them, there is no way to have the control group for an experiement.
Everyone kinda suspects it can't be good, nobody has any fucking idea is it really
This made me wonder do uncontacted peoples have microplastics in them in large amounts like we all do? Like say the Sentinelese, for instance? I'm sure they do have some at least, despite them not using it, but maybe not nearly to the extent we do? This isn't me advocating for using uncontacted peoples for studies and so on, obviously that's not a moral way to go at all. Just a curiosity thing. If so, then if this is the huge ticking time bomb we suspect it might be then maybe we'll all die off and they'll be pretty much the only ones left. Maybe even unaware for the most part that we all died off. Yeah I'm just rambling at this point...
They definitely have less of those, but given that we've found microplastics in deep sea creatures, I wouldn't think they have a lot less
I mean they could set in relation to the absolute values. Does a person who doesn't drink bottled water ingests 100 or 100.000 particles?
Oh, that's measurable. What isn't exactly measurable is what ingesting whatever number of particles does to you
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every now and then, on days like this, I am reminded that some countries don't think potable water is a basic right for their citizens
It's also significantly more expensive than buying a filter.
These threads are always a sad look past the curtain. Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.
Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction. We have storage for water since there’s really only pressure a few hours per week, at its best. I have the contact info of over ten water cistern drivers in case it’s out for too long - and it very often is.
Our tap water’s good enough to shower and wash dishes and clothes in, but not nearly enough to drink. It even doesn’t taste like the smell of diesel 300 days out of the year. Yeah we have filters, no sand is crusting up my washing machine’s valves anytime soon, but it won’t keep the bacteria out.
Drinking from plastic containers of various sizes between 300ml and 24L is the only fucking option for most people on the planet right now. It’s cheap in these places too, obviously.
Is drinkable tap water really that common around the world? I thought that was a rich people thing when I saw it in cartoons as a kid.
In basically the entire first world: yes, drinkable tap water is the norm. Even living in the middle of nowhere USA, you have well water and it is perfectly drinkable. (That is to say, rural American homes have their own well, water pump, and filtration system)
there’s really only pressure a few hours per week
Water towers are common and completely solve this issue. Even during power outages, gravity still works and water towers provide pressurized, drinkable water to everyone in the area.
You should look into getting a well installed. This is something you and your immediate neighbors could all benefit from and could go in together on if you can't afford it yourself.
If you don't mind me asking, what country do you live in? What you are saying is not something that is common in entire continents.
I’m in Lebanon. Your comment is reminding me how unusually flat the ground is where most of you live lol.
Most of us live on mountains with very messy elevation changes. Water towers are extremely uncommon. Generally, water is poorly filtered by the public water companies, then pumped uphill by dirty old pumps through dirty old pipes. Lebanon generates something like a third of its electricity demand, so… pumping is not constant.
Also single family homes are much rarer, most of us live in buildings that are 3-6 floors high. Water happens on the building level.
The water usually fills into a sort of well, a بير (pronounced like “beer”), not all buildings have that. Where I live, that’s the main bulk storage for water split among all the neighbors in the building. The water then gets pumped up to a large central holding tank on the roof (إمّاية ≈ “mother” tank), from which it then trickles it down to the individual apartments’ tanks (خزّانات = tanks) on the roof. Top floors need a pressure pump if they’re too close to the roof. Keep in mind that pumps need electricity, which we don’t always have. Floater valves everywhere. In my own building, my family and I have set up a rudimentary rainwater collection system. It’s not much, it’s not exceptionally clean, but it wasn’t ever either of those things. You can call a cistern man to fill your بير (“beer”).
We’ve had a main pop on our street before. It was a pathetic dribble of water seeping through cracks in the asphalt.
Re: wells, we used to be able to drink from the old town wells, but years of neglect and improper sewage handling means that you really really should not drink from them. I remember drinking from them as a kid, although my parents disapproved. Situation is worse now, I don’t drink well water anymore. The bad part is that well water was only drinkable in pretty rural towns, the worse part is that climate change has wrecked our groundwater supply and the wells I drank from as a kid have run dry. There’s less gentle rains and melting snow, and more summery Decembers with catastrophic, sudden storms. There are rivers I’ve swam in that are now stagnant little green spots. Cisterns are getting more expensive and more essential, and they’re struggling to fill them.
When my parents were kids they claim they could drink tap water. 15 years of brutal civil war and twice as much crony neoliberal “reconstruction” years later and nobody has dreamed up a contrived enough profit incentive to reliably deliver water and electricity. There are tribes warring in Sub-Saharan Africa with better basic utilities than we do because we live in an utterly dysfunctional feudal society. We’re technically in a continuous drought, but we have no mechanism to declare a drought season with drought measures.
That can’t be thaaaaaaaaat uncommon, riiiiiiiiight?
Here’s a funny story: when I was a kid, we got a dishwasher, and one of the first things you do is use the water hardness test strips and configure something in the machine. We rapidly learned that each cisternful of water was completely different and the only way around it was to underfill the salt tank and inshallah. Worked fine and still does.
Now you know why we pay 2-3 water bills per month. Come back tomorrow for the two power bills (power company and power mafia) and two Internet bills (it’s complicated). Surely I can bang out a few more manic 5 am comments this Christmas season.
Thank you for the detail. I haven't seen much on how such things work outside of documentaries and relief donation drives.
Good luck man. <3
Documentaries and relief programs only show you places that admit they are poor. We are too self-important to acknowledge what we are.
Neither of those would help us more than a sharp, lubricated guillotine at a string of well-timed political summits. We are ~200 heads and a fascist expansionist apartheid ethnostate neighbor away from being a functional country. We live under feudalism and unless all 200 heads go at the same time things get worse and not better. Don’t ignore the neighbor either, it’s hard to have nice civilian bridges if your civilian bridges get bombed every decade.
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That sounds really bad. Simple access to clean water should be available everywhere to everyone.
We pay like 20 USD per month for 24L water dispenser things of drinking water, delivered straight to the front door. Not ideal, but not a disaster on its own.
My entire country is built on individual little compromises that add up to a disaster. So much of my daily concerns are just worrying about the water supply. Who needs bullshit culture war nonsense when your populace is busy stealing their neighbors’ water in the dead of night for the decadent criminal luxury of not smelling like shit over Christmas lunch?
Fixing the water network is extraordinarily expensive and won’t enrich the twenty odd feudal lords who stand to profit from it so it’s not happening soon.
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Yes, in a lot of places, the municipal water is perfectly fine to drink. We penalize people who contaminate the groundwater, and the infrastructure is maintained well enough.
We still have water main breaks that result in a boil-water order, because a break in the pipe means bacteria could enter, but I've never had one in any place I've lived in the US.
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Knowing vaguely how municipal plumbing works I find the idea that so many pipes and fittings could be clean enough to drink from to be utopian fan fiction
That's actually a super interesting topic! In areas with aging infrastructure in first world countries, they intentionally up the mineral content of the water so it forms a second wall so to speak on top of the pipes, keeping it much more sanitary. (Paraphrased). Primarily for lead. Generally though, the constant flow of water running keeps things much cleaner than you might think.
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That's why I have a reverse osmosis system and use it to refill my plastic arrowhead bottles!
Best of both worlds!
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"Particles" is almost useless as a measure. They're not movie tickets, I'm not interested in their discreet number. Give me a defined quantity. Is 10,000 particles 1 gram, half a gram, a tenth of a gram, what?
"You're eating far too many particles of salt, we're going to need to to cut back by at least 2,000 particles every lunar cycle."
It's also meaningless without the context of how many particles other people consume.
She found that people ingest an average of 39,000 to 52,000 microplastic particles per year from food and drinking water, and those who use bottled water on a daily basis ingest nearly 90,000 more microplastic particles into their bodies.
Aha! So, now a more informative headline could be something like, "People Who Drink Bottled Water on a Daily Basis Ingest 3 Times as Many Microplastic Particles Each Year."
Which I would argue is also far scarier than just some out of context bigish number.
But, I'm with you on ditching "particles" altogether and providing it in a standard measurement.
Good point. But particle size is also important. Swallow a small sphere of 10g of plastic and it passes through you largely without consequence. 10g of nanoparticles and its in every one of your organs doing god knows what.
Which is kind of what I'm getting at. I've read that we have the equivalent to as much as a crayons worth of micro plastics in our brain. A crayon, while not particularly scientific, puts a pretty fine point on the issue in an intuitive sense, and also addresses the cumulative nature of the pollution. By the head line it seems like they are only talking about a certain sized micro plastic, and without further context they might as well just say "a lot".
I looked up what constitutes a unit of microplastics and the definition I found in this article was “any synthetic solid particle or polymeric matrix, with regular or irregular shape and with size ranging from 1 μm to 5 mm, of either primary or secondary manufacturing origin, which are insoluble in water”.
Because “microplastics” is a broad term that covers particles of varying size, structure, and weight, researchers refer to them in terms of number of particles per unit or total mass of microplastics per sample.
Great, how convenient that the latter option is based on mass, just as the OP requested. The researchers should clarify the number based on total mass.
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Apparently it's just as bad if not worse for most other mass-produced beverages, including glass-bottled (https://www.sciencenewstoday.org/glass-bottles-shed-more-microplastics-than-plastic-ones-surprising-french-study-finds) and aluminium-canned (which are all lined with plastic). In fact of the three, ironically plastic bottles were found to shed the fewest microplastics in this study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301479724037964
So buying things in glass or converting to cans makes no significant difference, and may make it worse. Plastic is everywhere in the manufacturing process (linings, filters, tubes, pipes). Soda and beer will not allow you to escape the microplastics problem.
If we could fast-forward to after the ground-shaking study that proves without a doubt that its incredibly bad for us, to the eventual 'plastic-free' manufacturing certifications that spring from it, that'd be swell. I'm thirsty.
That study did only look into microplastics above a certain size.
TL;DR: bottlecaps will shed some plastic
People are making fun of me because I'm going out of my way to avoid plastics. "You've already been exposed to decades worth" and "You'll never avoid it all" and a bunch of other logical fallacies borne out of good old fashioned defeatism.
Crinkly thin water bottles are the worst, as are bottles that have been exposed to UV light, so if you HAVE to use bottled water try and find thick PET bottles and keep them out of the sun.
As someone who's worked on a millionaire's yacht that refused to drink anything besides a gallon of Fiji a day and produced more plastic waste than all of West Palm Beach combined, thanks. This is the sweetest slice of schadenfreude pie I've had all week 🥧
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An under sink filter system has been one of my favorite small upgrades for my house. I always have a metal water bottle with me, and for longer times away I have a big metal half-gallon insulated jug.
Good thing I only drink bottled soda
I always thought it was funny (not haha) that bottlers use this relatively unstable plastic to create the bottles with which to store the water they sell.
Mexico City be in a spot.
Yeah, my entire country relies on bottled water. I can't drink from the tap. I need to buy carboys constantly because we can't really afford a water filter right now, and I doubt it'd come out as pure anyway. Of all the great things we do have, potable water for human consumption isn't one of them. *sad Mexican noises*
E: On the bright side, you may be able to get a glass carboy and fill it up at one of the new refilling centers that are popping up all around the city, so at least you have a say on the type of container you use and get your water all at a fraction of the price that Coke and Pepsi sell it for!
Well, my area has tons of nitrates (and other shit) that gives us a much higher rate of cancer. Damned if you don’t, damned if you do I guess.
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But my tap water has PFAS and lead...so I guess I get to pick my poison?
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Ironically glass may shed more micro plastics...
Researchers, including those from the French food safety agency ANSES, found an average of around 100 microplastic particles per litre in glass bottles of soft drinks, lemonade, tea, and beer.
This could be five to 50 times greater than the rate found in plastic bottles or metal cans, scientists say.
I'm skeptical about that study. I did stop buying glass bottles after seeing this (I was also swayed by them being more expensive and smaller) but intuitively it doesn't make sense to me that just particles from the bottle cap could cause more microplastics than the entire bottle made of plastic.
Acting like every plastic is the same makes as much sense as acting like every metal is the same...
But it seems it has more to do with the sealing process used.
Caps are painted/coated, then crimped around the outside of the bottle. It sounds like the crimper never gets cleaned, and since it's not sealed till crimped, we get some of those tiny particles shot into the bottle from the force of it.
So to bring it all back, the plastic bottles are manufactured with plastic that is "food safe". The coating on the caps is not. So very little leaches from a bottle, everything from the cap dust is just going to float around in there.
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How bad is it compared to RO? The membranes, pipes, fittings are all plastic.
Cool, well I must have drank several thousand of these throughout my life before water bottles really became a thing, so no biggie I'm sure.
that's two orders of magnitude lower than being of significance. they're microplastics. i might end up with a centiplastic at most that way. call me when they figure out how to get a million more plastics
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