Plastic water bottles, a long-known enemy of our Earth, are finding their way into human bodies in huge quantities—well, pieces of them are. A study published this week shows just how much plastic we drink with bottled water: Researchers from Columbia University and Rutgers have found at least 240,000 plastic particles in the average liter of bottled water, a major health concern.

Most of the plastic particles found by the researchers were extremely small nanoplastics, which have a diameter of less than one micrometer—making them invisible to the naked eye. Nanoplastics have been historically challenging to study due to their extremely small size, but as technology has improved, scientists are now finding them almost everywhere—including in the environment, plants, animals, beverages, foods, and our human bodies.

A perspective on policies, regulation, detection, and elimination in water and wastewater.

• A systematic review of the emergent pollutants presents in Mexican territory is provided.

• Main sources of emergent pollutants in México are the industry, agriculture and livestock.

• Technologies for emergent pollutants removal at industrial scale are necessary.

• Emergent pollutants needs to be included in Mexican Laws.

• Impacts of emergent pollutants over Mexican Biodiversity have been well documented.

Mineral water from several European nations has been found for the first time to be contaminated with TFA, a type of PFAS “forever chemical” that is a reproductive toxicant accumulating at alarming levels across the globe.

The finding is startling because mineral water should be pristine and insulated from manmade chemicals.

The contamination is thought to stem from the heavy application of pesticides containing TFA, or compounds that turn into it in the environment, which are used throughout the world.

Mexico’s national water commission (Conagua) has released its water quality data for 2023 revealing that while 55 per cent of groundwater sites were compliant with regulations, only 27 per cent of monitored surface water sites were found to be compliant.

Surface water quality

Conagua operated 450 sites in its surface water monitoring network during 2023.

Water quality was analysed for eight ‘indicator’ parameters: Five-day biochemical oxygen demand (BOD); chemical oxygen demand (COD); total suspended solids; fecal coliforms, escherichia coli (e-coli); fecal enterococci, percentage of dissolved oxygen saturation; and acute toxicity.

Key Lessons from the Study:

Women who were pregnant 20+ years ago had multiple types of PFAS in their blood.

In 2020-2021, researchers tested those maternal samples for 15 different PFAS compounds. They found 7 of the 15 in the bloodstream of nearly 90% of mothers in the study. The seven were: PFHxS, PFHpA, PFOA, PFOS, PFNA, PFDA, and PFUnDA.

Exposure to PFAS during pregnancy decreases the sperm quality of adult male offspring. Researchers found that both combined and single exposure to maternal PFAS concentrations during early pregnancy had a negative effect on the sperm quality—particularly sperm count, concentration, and movement—of adult male offspring.

Micro-nano plastics originating from the prevalent usage of plastics have raised increasingly alarming concerns worldwide. However, there remains a fundamental knowledge gap in nanoplastics because of the lack of effective analytical techniques.

This study developed a powerful optical imaging technique for rapid analysis of nanoplastics with unprecedented sensitivity and specificity. As a demonstration, micro-nano plastics in bottled water are analyzed with multidimensional profiling of individual plastic particles.

Quantification suggests more than 105 particles in each liter of bottled water, the majority of which are nanoplastics. This study holds the promise to bridge the knowledge gap on plastic pollution at the nano level.