as stated in the article-- it's not only boiling. Boiling results in plastics being coated by minerals-- at which point they can be filtered out via a filtration medium.
"Boiling hard water that’s rich with minerals — such as calcium or magnesium — creates a chalk-like residue known as limescale, or calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which can trap the plastics.
That solid, chalky residue then had to be separated and removed from the water with a standard coffee filter or stainless steel filter, thereby removing NMPs.
Tea isn't usually run through a filter (I make mine with filtered water, but I'd have to add a step where I pour the water through a filter before brewing). Only some coffee is - espresso and french press aren't). Not so sure about beer, I would guess many brewers filter the water coming into their tanks?
Right, lots of teapots also have a fine wire mesh to keep tea leaves from getting into your cup, but I doubt that'd be fine enough to catch 'chalky' microplastics. I would think espresso and French press would also need to have their water pass through a filter before coming into contact with the ground coffee.
Recent fad in espresso is to place a disk shaped coffee filter in the portafilter. Idea is to remove oils and smaller sediments but microplastics would get filtered too I guess. Though espresso machine would usually have soft water and this method doesn't work as well for soft water.
* Boiling hard water that’s rich with minerals — such as calcium or magnesium — creates a chalk-like residue known as limescale, or calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which can trap the plastics.
That solid, chalky residue then had to be separated and removed from the water with a standard coffee filter or stainless steel filter, thereby removing NMPs.
The team found that the impact was greatest in harder water: In samples that had 300 milligrams of CaCO3, for example, nearly 90% of NMPs were removed.
In softer water samples with less than 60 mg of CaCO3, roughly 25% of NMPs were removed.*
Tough for city people and those who bought water softeners. Go figure.
Wait. the main mechanism of concerns from microplastics is the body is from leaching of toxic chemicals once in the body. Wouldn't boiling increase the leaching of the chemicals into the water up front?
I think the idea is the calcium carbonate traps it but not sure why or how efficient it is. Or if you boil microplastics do they melt (become petrol or oil?) or do they stay intact or a mix.
The most commonly encountered plastics (Polyethylene, and Polypropylene) don't leech anything. It's mostly vinyl that leeches, and that's not a common microplastic.
That's an overpriced completely ordinary filter. All filters remove microplastics.
Just get a standard filter housing and it'll work just as well and you can pick any filter you want.
For example the KX 06-250-10-GREEN costs 1/4 as much and lasts 5 times as long. So basically costs 1/20th as much as the one you linked.
If you want even better microplastic performance pair it with a ceramic filter like the CRE-1, which removes even smaller microplastics than the carbon ones do.
Never buy a non-standard filter housing, they are never better and cost far more. In fact they cost so much more, throwing it in the trash and buying a standard housing will still save you money!
The question is by how much? I prefilter tap water with brita and then my RO unit filters into a glass container which re-adds minerals for taste. Post-filtration, it should only make contact with two pieces of plastic (the pipe to the drip and the lid of the container. Pre-mineral it's usually under 10ppm. Can I get it any better with any other method?
Agree, that its probably good enough. I still use my RO for drinking water. I would add that most of an RO filter is pure plastic, so perhaps something there? These would be interesting things to get the numbers on. I still think using an RO filter is > than not.
Yes, for larger microplastics. "Microplastic" means plastic particles less than 5mm in length. A Brita water filter will filter out anything larger than about 2 microns, which encompasses a lot of, but not nearly all, microplastics.
If this is a major enough concern to be worth spending some cash on, you can get much better water filters than the Brita that will filter out surprisingly tiny particles and get the vast majority of microplastics.
> Results indicate the presence of microplastic fibers in the samples after RO process. In particular, irregular shaped microplastic were detected and identified by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy analyses in attenuated total reflectance (ATR-FTIR) as alkyd resin (modified polyester) commonly used in paints. This microplastic detection was attributed by the authors to the occurrence of some membrane defects or simply small openings between pipework, indicating the necessity to ad-hoc design the processes for microplastic removal.
They didn't provide any quantative measurements, and the remaining microplastics were attributed to filter defects/leaks, which could affect any type of filtration. I think your conclusion ("not really") is off-the-mark.
"Boiling And Filtering water..."
as stated in the article-- it's not only boiling. Boiling results in plastics being coated by minerals-- at which point they can be filtered out via a filtration medium.
"Boiling hard water that’s rich with minerals — such as calcium or magnesium — creates a chalk-like residue known as limescale, or calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which can trap the plastics.
That solid, chalky residue then had to be separated and removed from the water with a standard coffee filter or stainless steel filter, thereby removing NMPs.
"