Boiling tap water before use can remove at least 80 per cent of the tiny, potentially harmful plastic particles it contains. are pieces of plastics like polystyrene, polythene and polypropylene that range from between 0.001 to 5 millimetres in diameter. Their impact on health is still being studied, but researchers suspect they are damaging to humans.
“We estimated that intakes of NMPs through boiled water consumption were two to five times less than those through tap water on a daily basis,” says Zeng. “This simple but effective boiling-water strategy can ‘decontaminate’ NMPs from household tap water and has the potential for harmlessly alleviating human exposure to NMPs through water consumption.”
The NMPs were removed by becoming ensnared in crystalline structures of limescale formed from the calcium in the water, says Zeng. More particles were removed from “hard” water – that containing high levels of calcium – than from “soft” water, which has lower levels of it.Allowing the water to reach boiling point was an important contributing factor to how efficiently those crystalline structures were created.