I believe a similar discovery lead to unleaded gas.
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2026
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A friend of mine worked at a research project 15 years ago, trying to determine how strongly several different causes could effect the amount of microplastics in drinking water.
He couldn't publish it because they weren't able to source any water without microplastic contamination for the control samples.
That sounds like bullshit. For a start, it's easy to baseline against zero. For another, if for some reason you need pure water, you can source pure water from the lab store just fine, and if not, you can buy make your own in the lab.
If you meant "They couldn't find a place that had no microplastics in their drinking water", then sure, but you don't need one.
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.
You can’t drink pure water (aside from small quantities).
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.
Still the study was about how factors add microplastics, and if you can’t reliably say “under this there’s no microplastics”
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, you could compare "This water has Y and Z, with this amount of microplastics. That water has X and Z, with that amount of microplastics".
But that's not what the study was about. It was about why they have more or less.
Filtered water is not pure water.
"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.
I haven’t done any real labwork in about a decade, so probably a dumb question, but wouldn’t repeat distillation be a viable option for a control like that? Or are you suggesting the gloves might’ve been the culprit?
I know you’ll always get some nanoplastics carried over through aerosol droplets able to survive, but I’d naively expect you could still get a few orders of magnitude cleaner than the ordinary DI tap.
My conpletely uneducated hobbyist guess would be that that would not work, because somewhere during the repeat distillation process you would be adding in more microplastics. Unless your entire setup, down to every fitting, is made of glass and completely sterilized of any microplastics then under the influence of heat youd simply be adding in more particulates. Also, as soon as its exposed to air then its exposed to the microplastics you exhale. If you store it in a mason jar with a gasket, or god forbid a plastic jug, or even a rubber stopper on a glass jar all introduce microplastics.
Yeah that's not too hard. Plenty of glass labware, including fittings. I doubt there is a significant number of microplastics in filtered air. And you could create water from plenty of reactions with sufficiently pure components.
You don't need to have absolutely zero microplastics, just as near as you can get for comparison.
But that's also a difficult question right, is there really an insignificant number of nano/microplastics in filtered air of filtered water? From what I've heard in cloud development, small particles can float along with water vapor, no clue how this would work in Destillation for instant.
I'm no expert on microplastics, but i do work in science so i do see papers getting around how plastics keep popping up in unexpected places. Sure a DM2 lab is expected to be super clean and safe and all, but idk. Maybe im also just a bit scared-biased
I don't see why he couldn't publish it. If the drinking water had a consistent amount of micro plastics then you have a baseline to work off of. Just subtract the starting amount from the finished amount to get the amount the causes contributed.
That has two issues:
- The water they want to measure comes from a different source than the lab water. Subtracting the lab water's contamination from that of the measured water would make no sense, since you'd get different results for the measured water's content depending on the lab water's purity.
- You need a zero baseline to calibrate your measurements. No matter which method you use to measure, you'll always have a measuring error. Which means your measurement will show some amount even with perfectly pure water.
Calibration with pure water will tell you X result is the systematic measuring error, so that is what you do subtract.
I don't know the specifics of his experimental setup, only what he told me, but my guess is that the differences between the measured water and the control water weren't clear enough to get a statistically significant result.
From the initial comment I thought they were doing stuff to water to see if microplastics were left behind.
Couldn't they distill their own in something metal?
Not buying this.
Even if true in this one study, it’s unlikely that this happened in 100% of the lab studies where microplastics were measured.
May have, but probably didn't.
Why probably?
Industry and politicians tend to downplay all issues whenever they find an excuse to do so, regardless of the truth. So, I'll side with probably this article was convenient propaganda.
Lab gloves are typically packaged in cardboard, and can be made from latex. Don't see how they would significantly skew data.
nitrile and latex gloves traditionally worn by laboratory scientists of all stripes, can shed particles called “stearates” that mimic microplastics. These hydrocarbons, added by the glove manufacturers to prevent the gloves from sticking to the molds, can fool spectroscopy machines and are nearly impossible to distinguish from polyethylene under electron microscopes.
Oh interesting! That's actually kinda cool. Thanks for posting that, I didn't have time to read it originally.
Lab gloves are nitrile plastic, they haven't been latex in decades.
There are still latex gloves around, they're just not that common
Can't use latex in any hospital and most labs avoid them because of allergy and higher costs.
Huh, last I wore goves was like 8 years ago, and my coworker had to have her own latex free gloves.