There’s a new trend in tea — out with the old, flat paper tea bags and in with the pyramid-shaped mesh bags that allow bigger leaves extra breathing room. The bags, which have been around since at least 2006, are sometimes called “silken” sachets. They can be made from hemp, corn-based plastics, nylon or PET (polyethylene terephthalate). But most often it’s one of the latter two: plastics.
But research out this week in Environmental Science & Technology reveals that plastic tea bags are doing a lot more than holding on to your tea. When you steep them in hot water — AKA make tea — they break down just enough to release billions of plastic microparticles right into your beverage.
Microplastics are in the news a lot lately, after showing up in bottled water and Arctic snow and table salt and a wide range of organisms. But these studies turned up much smaller concentrations of the plastics. The World Health Organization estimates that bottled water probably has tens to hundreds of particles per liter — just over two pints.
The new study, conducted by researchers at McGill University in Montreal, found a single plastic-based tea bag releases approximately, 11.6 billion microplastic particles and 3.1 billion nanoplastics (even smaller particles) into your mug.
