You Are Drinking Billions Of Tiny Plastic Particles From Every Tea Bag Inside Your Cup Of Tea
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.