No mention of which variant(s) (glass, plastic, both?) were tested, right? (or I haven't been able to find the statement)
- Measure bottle water microplastic contents.
- Measure tap water microplastic contents.
- Put tap water in bottles and graph amount of microplastics vs days. If you want to measure e.g. 10 days, fill and leave 10 * N bottles resting, then open and measure N bottles everyday.
- If it can be demonstrated that the plastics come from the bottle, repeat with other batches where every day the bottles are shaken vs still, or under the sun vs shadow, etc. to see what affects them the most.
We know microplastics are in the air, we know they are in aquifers, we know any plastic material municipal water is going through could result in micro plastic contamination just from wear, potentially from the filters they are running the water through before bottling and any plastic fittings or piping on that fill the bottles. It's wholly plausible it's a contamination of any/all of them in any given sample.
It would be interesting to compare carbonated versus uncarbonated.
I assumed that they were talking about from the bottle itself.
It's not clear how the plastic is getting into the bottled water — whether it's the water source itself or the air or the manufacturing and bottling process.
"Even the simple act of opening the cap could cause plastic to be chipping off the cap," Mason said.
I think it's easy to assume it's from the water source, & or a low quality filtration process, but it could very well be from the same bottle you are holding.
I suspect it's a combination of both. Is it possible some of the brands with higher counts use a lower quality plastic for the bottle & cap? This also makes sense to me since San Pellegrino has the lowest profile, and often comes in glass.