Summary
A new study from Spain’s Autonomous University of Barcelona reveals that tea bags made from nylon, polypropylene, and cellulose release billions of micro- and nanoplastic particles when steeped in boiling water.
These particles, which can enter human intestinal cells, may pose health risks, potentially affecting the digestive, respiratory, endocrine, and immune systems.
Researchers urge regulatory action to mitigate plastic contamination in food packaging.
Consumers are advised to use loose-leaf tea with stainless steel infusers or biodegradable tea bags to minimize exposure.
I’ve worked in a lab before. You would do it this way for a bunch of reasons.
First it’s more reliable to measure something if there’s a lot than a little. The effects of your measurement uncertainties and your error professional goes down. So better to measure 300 teabags than just 1 if you can find out the same thing from doing it that way.
As others have said, 95 deg C is hot, but it is well short of a boil.
The magnetic stir bar doesn’t blend the water, it just moves it around into a swirl, even at 750 rpm because it’s small.
If the ideal study would be to steep 1000 teabags in teacups with just-boiled water and measure the micro plastics to see how much is released on average, I can see why they did it this way instead when their focus was on what type of plastic is released vs exactly how much. I’m not sure the food and wine journalist did a great job walking the reader through this though.
So have I, and I understand why they would have chosen this approach. My issue isn’t their bench technique per se, it’s in their calling equivalence to tea brewing at home and articulating conclusions based on that.
Your objection to my describing it as “blending” is fair. However, it would absolutely not be plain swirling. With such a low ratio of liquid to teabags the physical agitation will be quite significant. Most people do not have multiple teabags in their teapot all colliding with and abrading each other while steeping.
However, the biggest cause for retraction is their failure to report accurate volumetric ratios. They used 2ml water per teabag and then reported their findings as particles/ml. It should be immediately obvious that this cannot be equated to the particles/ml that would have been derived from using 350ml per teabag, and yet they never make that conversion. I’m not going to speculate as to whether this was a result of intent to mislead or a simple mistake, but it utterly obliterates their talking point of “billions of particles”.
Yeah that all makes a lot of sense!