66 points

Stapleton said she now relies more on filtered water at her home in New Jersey.

But study co-author Beizhan Yan, a Columbia environmental chemist who increased his tap water usage, pointed out that filters themselves can be a problem by introducing plastics.

“There’s just no win,” Stapleton said.

Oh, man.

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28 points
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I’ve been saying this to people for a long time. Here in my country, most water filters are based on charcoal and a final filtering element. That element used to be made of cellulose and other organic materials, but in the last decade, they started coming with that element made of polypropylene, until all the cellulose ones disappeared from the market. Just imagine your water passing though a porous layer of plastic, like a rigid sponge… this is a serious microplastic source.

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8 points

You’re talking like .01% as much plastic use per liter as plastic bottle water packs. Is that not…much much better?

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7 points

I’m not sure how much microplastics are released in that way. It can be better than bottles, but if we used non plastic materials for so long, and it worked fine, I see no reason to put plastic in there.

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3 points
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Plastic is like lead, there shouldnt be any in our systems

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5 points

But the filters introduce way way fewer.plastics…?

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4 points

Distill water, then add minerals back into it, and bottle in glass, profit.

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3 points

Probably the best way. Distillation uses a lot of electricity, doesn’t it?

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3 points

Not necessarily. It just requires excitation at a molecular level. You can get creative with your source. They have been playing around with low energy methods like LED or even just using the sun, geothermal, etc.

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31 points
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”The International Bottled Water Association said in a statement: “There currently is both a lack of standardised [measuring] methods and no scientific consensus on the potential health impacts of nano- and microplastic particles. Therefore, media reports about these particles in drinking water do nothing more than unnecessarily scare consumers.”

Fuck capitalism - “no don’t be too cautious, just consume until we can finally prove what tiny particles accumulated in your organs can do. How bad can it be?”

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5 points

This is the same attitude the US Food and Drug administration takes. A product can only be scrutinized if a new ingredient is proven to be harmful.

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19 points

So plastic is made from oil, right? And oil is made from Dinosaurs. So we’re just surrounded by Dinosaurs. Even micro-Dino’s.

Is this their revenge?

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6 points

Oil comes from decaying organic matter, mostly trees and vegetation.

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2 points

shhh he likes to think gasoline is a triceratops

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1 point

I prefer T-Ret brand oil myself.

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19 points

Yet another reason to quit buying so much bottled water

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19 points

I guess. It seems like it doesn’t matter tho because it’s not just bottled water. It’s literally everything.

All the food you eat. Anything you drink. The air you breathe. The clothes you wear. Literally everything you interact with has some amount of plastic that you’re consuming.

You can put down the bottled water but the alternatives aren’t much better. Either way you’re being bombarded by microplastics.

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4 points

Oh, How I long for the olden days… I would literally die for a fresh glass of water plucked from a local stream. The copious amounts of lead and mercury combine with the rich abundance of feces, microbacteria and other organic matter, to create a pure, natural live giving elixir.

Now all of that has been removed and replaced with modern plastic. No thanks

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11 points

Yet another reason to quit buying so much bottled water…

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5 points

Would be nice if I could drink the tap water here

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18 points

I wonder how the refillable plastic 5 gallons are with plastic, we need to go back when they were made of glass

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5 points

Someone needs to invent soft glass that doesnt break so easily. Surely it cant be that hard.

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5 points

It’s not too hard, but it’s more costly, and consumers want a cheap as possible.

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3 points

Borosilicate glass fits the ticket (what pyrex is made of) but is quite expensive.

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