this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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But neither of those are drinking water. You can't drink pure water (aside from small quantities).
Still the study was about how factors add microplastics, and if you can't reliably say "under this there's no microplastics", so you had to assume a base level of them without explanation. If that base is high enough relative to most of the samples, you are in a situation were you can't explain much at all.
That's false, you can absolutely drink pure water, even in large quanties. Water remineralisation is mostly done for flavour, and because people selling water filters want to sell you some more stuff. Water only contains the tiniest traces of minerals, so you don't need it for nutrition. People who take long boat trips drink >99% demineralized water for weeks with zero health problems.
But, you could compare "This water has X, Y and Z, with this amount of microplastics. That water has X and Z, with that amount of microplastics". You'd just need to control for FAR more confounding variables, especially since microplastics persist from past events. If you had a control, it would be a lot easier, but this is was large population studies do all the time.
Filtered water is not pure water.
But that's not what the study was about. It was about why they have more or less.
"Pure" water stops existing as soon as you remove it from your sealed glasswork in the lab, if you want to be that pedantic. decently good commerical Reverse Osmosis filters will get water to under 20ppm total dissolved solids, so basically you're drinking 99.998% water*. Dutch tapwater is at worst 99.97% pure water, or 350ppm TDS in more jargon terms.
And you can drink that just fine, because (and this might shock you) water has basically no nutritional value. What mechanism are you suggesting that makes "pure" 99.998% water so dangerous compared to "impure" 99.97% water?
*not counting dissolved gasses (Radon, h2s), volatile liquids (benzene) or some medication (like some hormones and antibiotics), but those aren't exactly desirable or nutritionally important.
I don't want to be pedantic, I want to call things by it's name. Filtered water is not pure water and they aren't checking if glass A has more plastics than B.