Bottled water industry pushes back on new study warning of nanoplastics

The bottled water industry has pushed back against recent findings from Columbia University that its product contains hundreds of thousands of potentially dangerous “nanoplastics” — plastic particles small enough to get into human cells.

In a statement to The Hill, an industry trade association urged people to keep calm (and keep drinking bottled water) while scientists develop a more thorough understanding of these plastics and their impact on the human body.

“Media reports about these particles in drinking water do nothing more than unnecessarily scare consumers,” the International Bottled Water Association (IBWA) said. 

The IBWA was responding to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) that found there are nearly 250,000 nanoplastic particles in an average bottle of water. 

The researchers determined this by using lasers to identify plastic particles smaller than those that had been detectible before. These findings extended scientists’ ability to identify plastic fragments to the previously uncharted nano-scale — made of fragments measurable in billionths of a meter, or the approximate size of a virus.

The IBWA pointed to the fact these methods were novel — and the field of nanoplastics toxicology is in its infancy — to caution consumers against paying too much attention to the findings.

“There currently is both a lack of standardized methods and no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of nano- and microplastic particles,” it wrote.

The IBWA pointed to findings by the World Health Organization (WHO) that found evidence was too sparse to draw firm conclusions on the health impacts of nanoplastics in the environment — and identified the nano-scale as a particularly urgent priority.

In the IBWA’s account, these WHO findings meant less cause for concern. The health organization found that due to that scarcity of research, “no adverse health effects could be drawn” from the eating or drinking foods and beverages contaminated with micro and nanoplastics, the trade association said.

It also pointed to studies that had failed to find a clear threshold for what constituted safe microplastics or nanoplastics exposure, and an op-ed by a German government chemist that urged “scientists and ideally journalists [to] have a critical look on applied methods before trusting in the results of studies.”

It was, however, this same lack of information pointed to by these sources about the level of nanoplastics humans are consuming and whether they are harmful that the PNAS study itself sought to help solve.

A truism of science also holds that absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence.

As such, the WHO report’s caveat about limited data concludes with a host of warnings about potential harms from nano- and microplastics (NMP) pollution.

The WHO raised concerns about both the direct effects of such pollution on the human body, and the possibility that toxic microorganisms can form “biofilms” on plastic particles, and ride them into the body to cause wider inflammation and infection.

“The possibility of enrichment of antimicrobial-resistance genes in MP-associated biofilms and the role of NMP as vectors for pathogens and chemicals should be studied further,” the WHO wrote.

In calling for more research, the WHO was emphatic it considered plastic pollution to be a serious problem that is made worse, not better, by the lack of evidence — and one that the global public increasingly wants to see fixed. 

“Although the limited data provide little evidence that NMP have adverse effects in humans, there is increasing public awareness and an overwhelming consensus among all stakeholders that plastics do not belong in the environment,” the WHO wrote.

On one key point, however, the IBWA, the WHO, the Columbia team and other scientific sources were in agreement: that bottled water was far from the only source of plastics pollution entering human bodies.

Barbara Ossmann, the German government scientist, cautioned in her editorial that micro- and nanoplastics were being found in water not because they are necessarily more prevalent there, but because their level in water is comparatively easy to study.

The PNAS study, for instance, identified the nanoplastics that had been gathered by pouring bottled water through an extremely fine filter and using its laser imaging tools on the millions of fragments the researchers trapped — something that is far more difficult to do with a hamburger or a pound of human tissue.

The IBWA argued the bottled water industry is at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to this study.

Precisely because the bottled water industry’s product is so easy to check for nanoplastics, the trade association argues consumers may be getting the incorrect perception that potentially toxic compounds are more prevalent there than elsewhere.

“Bottled water is just one of thousands of food and beverage products packaged in plastic containers,” the IBWA wrote.

“Moreover, and perhaps even more important, nano- and microplastic particles are found in all aspects of our environment — soil, air, and water.”