Microplastics and nanoplastics, you might know, are now ubiquitous in the water and food supplies, thanks to our global addiction to oil-based conveniences.
The plastic problem is so widespread, in fact, that two years ago, scientists discovered, for the first time, microplastics in fresh Antarctic snow — which means they’re virtually guaranteed to be everywhere on Earth.
(For the record, COVID masks markedly exacerbated the microplastic problem.)
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Via Smithsonian Magazine (emphasis added):
Scientists have found microplastics—small plastic debris about the size of a sesame seed—in freshly fallen snow in Antarctica for the first time. They published their findings in The Cryosphere…
Microplastics have been found in almost every corner of the globe where researchers have looked, including on top of mountains and in remote ocean water. But scientists have not studied microplastics much in the Southern Hemisphere, particularly in Antarctica.
Working with coauthor Laura Revell, an associate professor in environmental physics also at Canterbury, Aves collected snow samples from sites across the Ross Island region of Antarctica, on the side closest to Oceania, including 13 remote locations with minimal human disturbance.
“We were optimistic that she wouldn’t find any microplastics in such a pristine and remote location,” Revell says in the statement. They also collected snow from six areas near research stations “so she’d have at least some microplastics to study.”…
Microplastics have been found in other remote areas of the Earth, including the top of Mount Everest and deep in the Mariana Trench. Earlier this year, researchers found evidence of the tiny plastics in human blood.
These unnatural little substances are documented to trigger a host of negative health outcomes when they accumulate in tissues and organs — and we’ve likely just scratched the surface on their devastating effects, as plastics entering the body is a relatively new phenomenon of the last half-century or so.
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But fear not! The good news is that it appears a simple DIY method available to virtually anyone with basic kitchen supplies can eliminate as much as 90% of these particles from water.
Via Science Alert (emphasis added):
Tiny fragments of microplastics are making their way deep inside our bodies in concerning quantities, significantly through our food and drink.
Scientists have recently found a simple and effective means of removing them from water.
A team from Guangzhou Medical University and Jinan University in China ran tests on both soft water and hard tap water (which is richer in minerals)…
They added in nanoplastics and microplastics before boiling the liquid and then filtering out any precipitates.
In some cases, up to 90 percent of the NMPs were removed by the boiling and filtering process, though the effectiveness varied based on the type of water.
Of course the big benefit is that most people can do it using what they already have in their kitchen.
Here I will quote from the study, which found that, in a nutshell, boiling water containing microplastics caused them to aggregate within the calcium carbonate (that crusty film that sometimes manifests with boiled tap water), which could then be easily filtered out with a strainer.
Environmental Science & Technology Letters (emphasis added):
We present evidence that polystyrene, polyethylene, and polypropylene NMPs can coprecipitate with calcium carbonate (CaCO3) incrustants in tap water upon boiling. Boiling hard water (>120 mg L–1 of CaCO3) can remove at least 80% of polystyrene, polyethylene, and polypropylene NMPs size between 0.1 and 150 μm. Elevated temperatures promote CaCO3 nucleation on NMPs, resulting in the encapsulation and aggregation of NMPs within CaCO3 incrustants. This simple boiling-water strategy can “decontaminate” NMPs from household tap water and has the potential for harmlessly alleviating human intake of NMPs through water consumption.
So if you’ve got a pot, a strainer, and your gas stove hasn’t been confiscated by your local government yet, you may be able to filter out almost all of these plastics in a few short minutes.
