Plastic: Study finds tiny synthetic bits in Great Lakes tap water — and beer
- Over the course of a year it is estimated that the average person consumes an estimated 5,800 plastic particles, most of them tiny fibers.
- Every one of the Great Lakes samples contained at least a few particles of plastic. Each sample was the size of a standard glass of water.
- One of the highest counts was in the Genesee River near downtown Rochester.
- The fear is that constant consumption of tiny bits of plastic can unleash chemicals internally that have subtle effects.
Tiny bits of plastic, most of them too small to see, have been found in Great Lakes drinking water and Great Lakes beer.
Yes, even beer.
Researchers have detected microplastics in drinking water collected in the United States and 12 other nations on four continents. Their study, the first-ever search for bits of plastic in the world’s tap water, suggests plastics are polluting drinking water in Rochester and in Buffalo.
Over the course of a year it is estimated that the average person consumes an estimated 5,800 plastic particles, most of them tiny fibers.
The study offers fresh evidence of another way in which our natural environment, our food chain and our bodies themselves are being sullied by discarded, virtually indestructible plastic.
"They’re in our food, they’re in our water, they’re in our air. There’s no way anybody living on the planet today is not ingesting plastics. That’s reality," said Sherri A. Mason, a noted upstate New York researcher who co-authored the study.
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It is unclear whether swallowing all those tiny bits of synthetic material is bad for us, but scientists are working to answer that question. After Mason and colleagues published data earlier this year that showed bottled water is swimming with plastics, officials from the World Health Organization, a U.N. body, said a review of health impacts may be needed.
The fear is that constant consumption of tiny bits of plastic can unleash chemicals internally that have subtle effects. Even without the science being settled, Mason said common sense would dictate caution.
"Innately, most of us go, 'Plastics being lodged in my brain is probably not a good thing,'" said Mason, who chairs the geology and environmental sciences department at the State University College at Fredonia.
The Great Lakes, which supply drinking water to an estimated 40 million people in the United States and Canada, have become a focal point of concern about plastic contamination.
Mason was the first to document the presence of microplastics in the Great Lakes in 2013. She and others later found bits of plastic in numerous rivers and streams that feed the Great Lakes. One of the highest counts was in the Genesee River near downtown Rochester.
Plastic particles common in tap water, beer, and salt
Subsequent research by professors at the Rochester Institute of Technology estimated that 10,900 tons of plastic enter the Great Lakes every year.
They also concluded that the southern shore of Lake Ontario, from which more than a half-million New Yorkers get their drinking water, is among the most plastic-riddled areas in the Great Lakes system.
Plastic material floating in the lakes often washes ashore, fouling beaches with a sad array of detritus. Plastics also may be taken up by fish and wildfowl, potentially accumulating in their bodies and causing them harm.
And, as the newest research demonstrates, they’re being consumed daily by people who live on the lakeshore.
That research tested six tap-water samples from Lake Michigan, and one each from the other four Great Lakes. The Lake Ontario sample came from Clayton, a small town in Jefferson County.
Every one of the Great Lakes samples contained at least a few particles of plastic. Each sample was the size of a standard glass of water.
The particles are released into the environment by the everyday activities of normal people.
"There have been studies showing that plastic pollution is just about everywhere we look, from the Arctic to the air, so it is not surprising that it would be in tap and bottled water as well as other things," said Matthew J. Hoffman, one of the RIT professors who calculated the plastics burden in the Great Lakes.
"This underscores the global reach and impact that human activities have."
Water, salt and beer
In 2017, Mason and two co-researchers at the University of Minnesota, Mary Kosuth and Elizabeth B. Wattenberg, tested bottled water, tap water, beer and sea salt for the presence of plastic. Their findings were published in April in PLOS ONE, a peer-reviewed online journal.
They found tiny bits in everything.
The fibers were so small that testing could not immediately verify them as plastic, the scientists wrote in their paper. But the fibers’ characteristics were such that they concluded the fibers could be nothing else.
Sea salt. Every one of the 12 brands they tested had some particles. The average concentration was six bits of plastic per ounce of salt, though one brand had 23 pieces. The salt came from domestic and overseas producers.
Beer. Every one of the 12 brands they tested had some plastic particles, though many brands had only one or two per sample. The average concentration was just two pieces of plastic per pint glass of beer, though one brand had seven pieces.
All the beers were brewed using municipal water drawn from one of the Great Lakes. Two of the breweries use Lake Ontario water. One of those is in the Rochester area.
Those two Lake Ontario beers were at the high end of the spectrum, with about four plastic particles per pint.
Tap water. The researchers tested 159 samples that were collected in numerous places around the world, including 20 cities in the United States. Only 31 of the samples contained no plastics.
Of the 14 nations whose tap water was tested, only Italy's was plastics-free. Germany, Ireland and France had the lowest average concentrations, averaging fewer than one particle per 16-ounce glass of tap water.
England and Lebanon averaged about three particles per glass. The United States’ average results were highest, with four-and-a-half particles per glass of water. Two of the U.S. samples had about 14 particles.
In the text of their study, the authors said one might expect developing nations, with comparatively poor waste-handling and water-filtering technology, to have more plastic in their tap water.
Instead, they found that developed nations such as the United States had more. They had no ready explanation for that.
Bottled water. This work, done separately from the tap water, beer and sea salt analysis, examined 259 samples of bottled water sold in various countries by 11 major producers. Plastic particles were found in 93 percent of the water samples that were tested.
The bottled water contained an average of five larger plastic particles per 16 ounces. The average sample also contained about 155 small particles; those smaller particles were presumed to be plastic but not verified as such.
The bottled-water study was done in conjunction with Orb Media, an environmental news organization. Orb and other news organizations have released the only data on the analysis to date. Orb also helped collect samples used in the tap-water/beer/sea salt study.
A formal report on the sampling is written and should be published in several months, Mason said.
Several bottlers disputed the results, saying their internal testing found little or no plastic in their products.
Of note, however, a separate study scheduled to be published in a peer-reviewed journal in September found the same thing — very large quantities of microplastics in bottled water.
The German researchers who did that study were able to look for much smaller sizes than the Minnesota-Fredonia team, and found thousands of bits per bottle.
Water from plastic bottles tended to contain microparticles of the plastic used to make the container, those researchers said. Water from glass bottles had different plastics and more particles overall, suggesting the material was getting in the water during bottling. The types of plastics Mason and her colleagues found in their bottled-water samples haven’t been spelled out yet, but they were able to be specific about the material in the tap water they tested.
Nearly all of those particles were fibers much thinner than a human hair. The average length was a 25th of an inch, and many were so short they showed up only under a microscope.
Countless larger bits of plastic float in Lake Ontario, but it’s likely they were removed in the filtration process used to treat municipal drinking water.
In the Rochester area, the filtering system at the two treatment plants on Lake Ontario can remove tiny bacteria from the incoming water, said Richard Metzger, the Monroe County Water Authority’s executive engineer.
But the authority, whose water is distributed throughout suburban Rochester and part of the city, has no way of knowing how much plastic it’s removing from the water.
"It’s always an issue of percentages. There’s nothing that is 100 percent. We could be removing 99 percent. I don’t know," Metzger said.
The authority, like other public water suppliers, does not target plastic particles in its processing or sample for their presence. There is no federal regulatory requirement that they do so, and no agreed-upon way to do the sampling.
"I know it’s on their radar, but they have not given us guidance and regulations in terms of what they’d like us to look for," Metzger said. "It’s what we refer to as an emerging contaminant. There will be more to hear about it for sure. But for the present, we’re waiting for the experts."
Bottle caps, food wrappers, one soggy cigarette butt after another. On a Saturday morning in July, two dozen people scoured Ontario Beach Park for trash.
In two hours, they picked up 109 pounds of it. Nearly all of it was some form or another of plastic.
Plastic pollution “is a hugely significant problem,” said Tammy Bleier, who organized the cleanup under the auspices of the Plastic Lakes Project. “It's having an impact on ecosystems, and it could impact humans by entering the food chain and drinking water.”
The cleanup at Ontario Beach, which filled 18 bags with 5,219 pieces of trash, is one of countless organized and ad hoc beach cleanups that occur every year on the shores of the five Great Lakes.
Alliance for the Great Lakes sponsored 544 pickups last year. Thousands of volunteers gathered more than 18 tons of trash from beaches on all five Great Lakes. Eighty-nine percent of it was plastic.
But all of that’s just a drop in the bucket.
As Hoffman and his RIT colleague Eric Hittinger found, nearly 30 tons of fresh plastic debris enter the Great Lakes every single day.
They estimated that about 2 percent of all plastic waste in lakefront communities is "mismanaged," to use their polite euphemism, and roughly a third of that winds up in the water.
In the case of the Rochester area, this translates into 172 tons of plastic junk deposited in Lake Ontario annually, Hoffman and Hittinger wrote.
That' s the equivalent of 371 million plastic straws tossed off the end of the Charlotte pier each year.
Plastic particles both large and small tend to congregate in certain areas, such as the south end of Lake Michigan near Chicago and Milwaukee. That area has among the greatest concentration of plastics in the lake.
Elsewhere, the plastic bits follow currents that parallel the shoreline. In Lake Ontario, the RIT researchers concluded that debris from metropolitan Toronto eventually moves with counter-clockwise currents to the American side of the lake.
There, the Canadian trash joins with plastic pollutants that flow down the Niagara River from the Buffalo area and particles that wash into the water in western New York — and all of it slowly floats along the south shore of the lake toward Rochester.
The offshore area of the lake where Rochesterians sail, motor and fish for salmon has heavy concentrations of offshore plastic debris.
That analysis of plastic densities might explain why beer from Chicago and upstate New York had the most plastic in it.
It also could explain why so much plastic washes up on beaches here.
Who put all this junk in there?
A foam plate blows off a picnic table, a plastic bag is sucked out a car window, an old lawn chair is hurled into a ravine, a cigarette butt is extinguished in the sand. One way or another, that plastic can wind up in the water.
Some synthetic debris washes in directly, off a beach, a dock or a lakefront lawn. Some falls off boats or is tossed in.
Other debris on sidewalks, streets, parking lots lawns and fields is washed into drainage ditches and storm sewers. Most of those ditches flow into creeks, and the creeks in a good portion of upstate New York flow into Lake Ontario or Lake Erie.
A 2016 study co-authored by Mason examined water in 29 rivers and creeks that flow into the Great Lakes. The streams were in six states; some were remote and seemingly pristine.
Some particles are created small, like the microbeads in grooming products that were banned several years ago. But larger bits of plastic can fragment into smaller pieces under the influence of sunlight, cold weather, rain, wind and waves.
Smaller bits of plastic that get flushed down toilets or washed into combined sewers wind up at treatment plants like the two that Monroe County operates on the shore of Lake Ontario.
Plants such as those remove larger bits of plastic but not smaller ones. A recent study found that Americans flush billions of plastic contact lenses each year, and some of them make it through sewer plants and into lakes and rivers.
Most of the tiny fibers that wind up in drinking water and beer have a different source: residential and industrial washing machines that launder polyester shirts and pants and those popular "polar fleece" jackets, vests, robes and blankets.
Manufacturers churn out 66 million tons of plastic-based fabric each year.
Tiny fibers break off and waft through the air, a study has found, and accumulate on soil and pavement. They also come loose in washing machines. From there, they flow to sewage plants, which are not able to remove all of them during the treatment process.
That's one of the pipelines, then — your laundry to the open water.
And from there, perhaps, into your tap water.
How many fibers are in our drinking water, and what, if anything, they do to our bodies, remain to be seen.
More work needed
"Our drinking water survey was a rough indicator that these pollutants exist," said Kosuth, the tap-water study’s lead author. "A next logical step would be to compare local water sources."
The study's very limited look at the Lake Ontario water that supplies much of the Rochester area suggests it may contain synthetic fibers.
The other major water supply in the area, the city of Rochester’s famously pristine sources of drinking water, Hemlock and Canadice lakes, have never been checked for plastic.
City officials say there is no need. They note there is no industry and limited human activity near the two lakes, which are about 30 miles south of the city amid an undeveloped state forest.
"There isn’t much reason to believe that this is an issue," spokeswoman Jessica Alaimo said.
But researchers have found plastic bits in Adirondack Mountain streams, rivers in far-northern Minnesota and an icy lake in the far reaches of Mongolia.
Junk left by tourists, poor waste-handling by residents and air deposition are the likely sources.
"What we’re finding is it doesn’t matter where in the world you live. Even in the most pristine bodies of water we’re looking at, we’re finding contamination," Mason said.
The limits on development around the two Finger Lakes whose water flows to Rochester-area consumers don't protect them.
"They’re going to have plastics, yeah," Mason said. "I don’t think there’s a body of water on the planet that doesn’t have plastics. It’s just everywhere."
The plastic debris in tap water, beer and sea salt was identified and counted in the most direct way possible: by hand.
Particles in the samples were filtered out carefully. Each individual particle was examined under a microscope and then photographed. As they went through this painstaking procedure, the researchers also made note of the particle’s color.
And oddly enough, the predominant color in tap water, beer and sea salt was blue. Pink/red was second. Other hues trailed.
Why? “We don’t really know. We were kind of curious about that as well,” said researcher Sherri A. Mason.
The color was noted because they thought it might help determine the source of the debris. The color also is noteworthy because fish have shown a propensity to ingest darker-colored plastic fibers, Mason said.