You Are Drinking Billions Of Tiny Plastic Particles From Every Tea Bag Inside Your Cup Of Tea
Thursday, September 26, 2019 IST
Do you love drinking tea at work? Chances are you might be using tea bags to make yourself a nice refreshing brew. However, you might want to stop doing that as recent research has revealed that the tea bag is releasing billions of plastic nanoparticles inside your tea, which isn't good.
The test was conducted by a group of Canadian researchers from McGill University (reported in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology). Now you might be confused thinking that tea bags are usually made up of paper and you are right. However, in order to seal these bags, they use polypropylene, which is a kind of plastic.
Moreover, various tea brands also are seen using net tea bags made out of plastic which equally contribute to the problem.
Researchers wanted to find out how much microplastic is released into the tea when brewing. To do that, they bought four different teas packaged in plastic tea bags. They then cut open the bags, removed the tea leaves and rinsed the empty bags.
Then, they heated the teabags in specific containers of water to recreate brewing conditions. They were looking at the particles using an electron microscope and they discovered that a single plastic teabag at brewing temperature released about 11.6 billion microplastic pieces and 3.1 billion nano plastic particles into the water.
According to the researchers, these levels are thousands of times higher than what was reported in the past pertaining to other food types.
Nathalie Tufenkji, one of the researchers from McGill University says, "We think that it is a lot when compared to other foods that contain microplastics. Table salt, which has a relatively high microplastic content, has been reported to contain approximately 0.005 micrograms of plastic per gram salt. A cup of tea contains thousands of times greater mass of plastic, at 16 micrograms per cup."
They also wanted to test the harm such a tea could cause. They treated water fleas with different doses of the micro and nano plastics from tea bags. While the fleas survived, they did reveal anatomical and behavioural anomalies.
Even though the studies don't reveal something highly dangerous, more tests need to be made to truly clear the air.
If you still want to consume tea at work, but are scared to use teabags now, we recommend that you look for tiny metal tea infusers (like the one in image above) online and use tea leaves from the bag to make a clean non-plasticky brew.
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