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Title : plastic particles in water bodies are underestimated: Report
Date : Feb 21, 2024
Description :
In a new study, researchers have found that bottled water sold in stores can contain 10 to 100 times more bits of plastic than previously estimated.
Nanoplastics are difficult to analyse due to their size and also due to the inability of different diagnostic techniques to identify them. Researchers used a SRS imaging platform along with an automated algorithm to identify plastics. The algorithm extracted detailed information about the chemical makeup from data produced by the SRS platform. Studies have found that plastic items can break down into sub-micrometre pieces, meaning they can breach biological barriers and enter different parts of the bodies of living beings.
according to the study, 1 liter of water — contained an average of 240,000 plastic particles from seven types of plastics, of which 90% were identified as nanoplastics and the rest were microplastics.
The term microplastics refers to pieces of plastic which are smaller than 0.5mm in diameter, which is roughly equivalent to a grain of rice. Meanwhile, nanoplastics are far smaller, at just 100 nanometres or less.