Tap Is Tops When It Comes to NYC Drinking Water

The Environmental Protection Agency has issued some good news for thirsty New Yorkers. Our tap water, the EPA said in a June 2 report, is clean and safe to drink, free not only of micro-organisms, but also already up to meeting stringent new federal standards that limit so-called “forever chemicals,” the potential carcinogens that do not degrade and disappear.

“Thus far, we don’t think protecting New Yorkers to these new standards is going to require any significant change because right now, we have no levels of PFAS that would put us in violation of these new standards,” city Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Rohit Aggarwala recently told THE CITY, a not-for-profit news service.

Microplastics or nanoplastics—known as PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—are tiny particles formed when manmade plastics break down into smaller bits. Manufacturers add them to all sorts of products, from clothes and makeup to cookware and packaging. They help make clothing stain-resistant and are responsible for non-stick frying pans.

Recently, a research team led by Columbia University investigators Wei Min and Beizhan Yan tested (but did not name) three popular brands of bottled water sold in the US. Their data, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, counted about 240,000 detectable plastic particles in each of their typical liters, 10 to 100 times more than previous studies estimated. About 90 percent of the particles were nanoplastics and 10 percent of them were microplastics, all ranging in diameter from 1-micron nanos to 5-millimeter micros. (For comparison: Depending on color and the head it comes from, a human hair ranges from 50 to 120 microns wide.)

There are more than seven types of plastics in the entire mix, part of what Min calls the “huge world of nanoplastics.” He says it’s not size that matters. It’s the numbers, but the smaller things are, the more easily they can get inside us. What happens when they do is still being researched, but some evidence suggests these teensy bits may impact our endocrine and reproductive systems, leading to such unpleasantries as reproductive abnormalities, nerve damage, oxidative stress, carcinogenicity, altered metabolism, reproductive abnormalities, gastro problems, and increased risk of The Big One: Death.

Can you get rid of these troublemakers? Probably not. University of Massachusetts chemical engineer Anna Marie LaChance told the website Verywell.com that by the time bottled water has been packaged, shipped to a store, and is sitting in your kitchen cabinet or fridge, the plastics are already there. Pouring the water into a glass or another bottle won’t flush them. Boiling the water will kill any lurking bacteria, but it won’t lay a molecule-size figurative finger on the plastics. Filtration can help, but not all filters remove microplastics, and only a few remove nanoplastics. The pragmatic LaChance says our water “needs to have its nanoplastics removed at the source and dealt with at the public scale: in our wastewater treatment plants.”

Replacing bottles on a regular basis does offer some benefit because the longer a bottle sits around, the more time plastics have to slip into the water. Keeping the water cool also helps a bit, says Chance: “Water from a water bottle that’s been sitting in your car on a hot day probably has much more plastic in it than water from a bottle that’s been sitting on a store shelf at a controlled temperature, unexposed to light.”

Overall, the only way to avoid plastics is to avoid plastic, so, one simple way to reduce your exposure is to switch containers. Instead of storing food in plastic, or drinking liquids from plastic bottles, consider using glass, aluminum, or stainless-steel alternatives. And never, ever microwave food or drink in plastic containers because the heat can accelerate the release of plastic particles into the food.