Are you drinking water in a plastic bottle? Then you are at risk

Geneva, March 16: You already know how bad plastic bottles are for the planet. We go through a million of them per minute and are generally terrible at recycling. As a result, bottles join other plastic waste in clogging up waterways, harming wildlife and accumulating in delicate ecosystems.

Now we know this plastic use is probably not too good for us, either. In fact, taking a sip of bottled water might come with more than you bargained for.

The water sold in plastic bottles contains microplastics at levels that might endanger human health, according to a recent study. As a result, the World Health Organization plans to investigate the potential health risks of ingesting plastic.

Microplastics are pieces of plastic that have broken down a size smaller than a fingernail. About 275,000 metric tons of the stuff enter our waterways each year, according to some estimates.

A finding suggests that a person who drinks a liter of bottled water a day — half of what the average person needs every day — might be consuming tens of thousands of microplastic particles each year.

We don’t yet know how microplastics affect our health, but there’s reason to think that their buildup in our systems wouldn’t be good for us. We already know that when microplastics build up in animals like fish, they affect their behavior and alter their hormones. Some chemicals in plastic are known to have similar effects on humans.