Don't Buy the Panic Over Microplastics in Bottled Water

A Big Panic Over Tiny Plastics - MIKE PESCA

• Science can detect increasingly small particles of plastic in our air and water. That doesn't mean it's bad for you.

"A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in January has been used for a media wave of scaremongering about plastic residue in bottled water...

• The smallest-sized particles the researchers picked up measured 100 nanometers. This means we can now detect bits of plastic so small that 10 million of them would amount to a piece of microplastic a fraction of the width of a hair...

Nearly every news outlet hit concerned thirsty Americans with headlines such as "Scientists Find About a Quarter Million Invisible Nanoplastic Particles in a Liter of Bottled Water" (Associated Press) and "Bottled water contains hundreds of thousands of potentially dangerous plastic fragments: Study" (The Hill), as if the 240,000 figure is directly meaningful to their readers.
The number of pieces of plastic, as opposed to the amount of plastic, is irrelevant to the danger (if there even is a danger), but the aim was to communicate dread at all of the tiny shards of toxicity loosed upon our water-gulping bodies...