A recent study reveals that when a tea bag is steeped in hot water, a significant number of microparticles are released.
For an avid tea drinker, there are a few options you can drink with it, either milk, lemon, or honey. That means microplastics are a definite no-no! However, according to Health Line, recent studies have discovered that billions of microplastics or nano plastics are present in tea bags.
At present, there is an increasing presence of micro and nano-sized plastics in the environment and food chain, which results in a growing concern.
Although there has been widespread promotion to reduce single-use plastics, there are still several companies creating new plastic packaging to replace conventional paper uses, such as plastic tea bags.
Microplastic particles are about a human hair's diameter, while a nano plastic is about 1,000 times smaller.
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A recent study found in Environmental Science and Technology revealed that soaking a single plastic tea bag at 95 °C can release approximately 11.6 billion microplastics.
This can also release 3.1 billion nano plastics into your tea. This means that there are billions of nylon and polyethylene terephthalate particles present in one cup of tea.
The research results suggest that the numbers were a thousand times higher than those reported previously in other foods. Researchers said that table salt has 0.005 micrograms of microplastics per gram of salt. Meanwhile, a tea bag contains 13 and 16 micrograms of microplastics.
The research team purchased four different brands of plastic tea bags from coffee shops and grocery stores in Montreal. To ensure that they were only testing plastic leached from the bags, the tea leaves were removed entirely. Afterward, these tea bags were rinsed clean.
To simulate the process of brewing tea, the tea bags were heated in water. Electron microscopy was used to measure the number of minuscule plastics found in the heated water.
As a response to the published research, President of the Tea Association of the U.S.A., Inc., Peter F. Goggi, stated that it would like to assure consumers that tea brewed in tea bags is safe to consume. He added that the materials used in creating tea bags, including nylon and PET, have all been assessed by the FDA.
The first author of the study and Ph.D. student, Laura Hernandez, revealed that the idea came up when her supervisor got a plastic tea bag in a Montreal coffee shop. Hernandez said that she was surprised to see such a high concentration of plastics coming out. However, the World Health Organization (WHO) suggests that there should be a further assessment of microplastics and their impacts on human health.
WHO claims that microplastics larger than 150 micrometers are not likely to be absorbed in the human body. Additionally, the absorption and distribution of the nanosize range may be higher, although the data is minimal.
In defense, the McGill researchers claim that they treated water fleas with differing dosages of nano plastics and microplastics. They discovered anatomical and behavioral abnormalities such as effects with the distance water fleas could swim.
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