- Microplastics — tiny particles in the air, water, and soil — are increasingly found in drinking water and food supplies around the world.
- The effects of microplastics on humans have been studied and found to affect the composition and diversity of gut microbiomes.
- Researchers in China found that boiling hard tap water can produce calcium carbonate, which form crystallized encapsulations around microplastics that could be scraped or removed by pouring the water through a coffee filter.
- This technique removed up to 90% of the microplastics in samples of hard water and up to 25% of the microplastics in soft water.
Microplastics — tiny particles in the air, water, and soil — are an unfortunate byproduct of the globalized economy in a time that some researchers have defined as the
Defined by the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), and the European Chemicals Agency as particles under 5 millimeters (mm) long and insoluble in water, microplastics are increasingly prevalent in the Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, drinking water, and food supplies.
Some studies have examined the effects that microplastics have on the human gut microbiome. In 2022, researchers published a study in the journal
While there are some water filtration systems that can reduce the number of microplastics in municipal drinking water supplies, a new study in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters suggests that boiling and filtering water — using the same methods and materials that one might use to make tea or coffee — could reduce 90% of free-floating nano- and microplastics (NMPs).
Researchers took samples of hard tap water from Guangzhou, China, and added different levels of NMPs to different samples, then boiled each sample for five minutes.
They found that…
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