Image:Flickr
Who doesn’t like coming home at the end of the day and drinking a nice cup of relaxing tea? Well, before you take a sip, you should first take a look at your teabag.
Recently, tea companies have started to switch from paper base teabags to ones made up entirely of plastics, specifically polyethylene terephthalate and nylon. This caught the attention of Laura M. Hernandez and her team over at McGill University, in which they recently published their findings showing that plastic teabags, also known as silken bags, release billions of plastic particles into the tea that is consumed.
Image:Flickr
The team took plastic teabags of different brands and steeped them, one by one, into boiling water at 95℃. When the tea bags were placed into the water they released about 11.6 billion microplastics (100 nm to 5 nm) and 3.1 billion nanoplastics (≤ 100 nm) into a single cup. The amount itself can be alarming, however humans consume an average of 39000 to 52000 microplastic particles annually, and this can increase based on various factors.
The question now stands, does consuming microplastics affect human health? Well, according to the World Health Organization, consuming microplastic has a low health risk in humans, but the amount of microplastics consumed should still be monitored in individuals. For instance, a study found that consuming large amounts of microplastics, over a long period of time, can lead to potential risks of cancer and toxicity in humans. That being said, microplastics effects on human health is an emerging field of study, as many microplastics are now used in everyday materials and products, such as in the food and water industries.
As Hernandez and her team have discovered, the teabags make delicious tea, but the amount of microplastics you are consuming per cup can be a bit concerning. Therefore, more research needs to be conducted on microplastics and its effect on human health.
– Anum Khan.
