Microplastics are in our favourite drinks – and tea and coffee are worst offende

If you’ve been wondering why your tea tastes a little odd, just know it’s not the milk that’s off.

Most of our cuppas have a funky ingredient that we don’t know about – tiny pieces of plastic that can wriggle into our blood and tissues.

A study has found that a cup of tea made with a teabag contains traces of microplastics, which can be as large as 5mm.

But it’s not just a cuppa that contains countless plastic particles.

According to a new study, people are guzzling down microplastics every day in common drinks.

What are microplastics?

These days, it feels like everything from clothing and water bottles to chopping boards contains microplastics.

Microplastics come from larger plastics that degrade with use or aren’t chucked away properly. A bit like how our skin sheds tiny flakes over time.

This can happen both on a large scale (farming equipment shedding plastic crumbs into the soil) or on a small scale, such as a plastic carrier bag floating in the ocean.

How do they get into our bodies?

A fair few ways, given that microplastics are in our air, soil, water and food.

Microplastics and their even smaller cousins, nanoplastics, can easily be inhaled and digested given their size.

They become tangled in plant roots and are digested by farm animals that end up in our supermarkets. Some evidence suggests our skin can absorb them if they’re inside beauty products or clothing.

An average tea bag is made from polypropylene, which scientists have previously found releases about 1.2billion small pieces of plastic per millilitre of tea.

What did the study find?

Researchers took samples of 155 beverages and found microplastics in them all, ranging between 10–200 micrometres in size.

This is thought to be the first to look at microplastic infiltration of different cold and hot drinks from the same country.

The team found that how many plastic particles were floating in the drinks depended on how they were served and at what temperature.

Iced drinks tend to contain far fewer and smaller microplastics (MPs) as heat makes plastic cups, straws, stirrers, teabags and coffee filters shed particles faster.

This was the case, the researchers found, even if the ice-cold sea was served in a bottle made from PET (polyethene terephthalate).

Piping hot tea in a plastic cup averaged about 22 MPs per cup, far higher than the 14 MPs in a glass cup. Pricier tea bags had the most MPs per cup, at 27-30 MPs.

Researchers found similar results with coffee, with hot coffee in a disposable paper cup averaging 16 MPs. But a cold brew served in a PET bottle was found to have 11MPs bopping about, which came not only from the bottle but the ice inside.

A cup of Joe in a glass container similarly had fewer MPs, while older coffee machines would shed more MPs.

Even fruit juice was packed with plastic debris, with 42 MPs in PET bottled juice and 23 MPs in a carton.

Are microplastics harmful to our health?

How much they impact our health is still unclear.

Studies involving animals show that the tiny plastics could harm the gut, lungs and reproductive system.

It’s not clear, however, how this translates to humans. Early research has found a link between microplastics and preterm births, heart disease and dementia.

The researchers said: ‘Our findings highlight the potential health risk associated with microplastic contamination in tea. 

‘Continued exposure to microplastics through drinks may contribute to daily intakes, leading to potential adverse implications for health.’

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