This is a 17-minute video about bottled water in Canada. It is very interesting to think that the country with 25% of the earth's freshwater throws out 12,000 plastic water bottles every 4 minutes. What are the rest of us doing?
Last year the WHO announced in a report that microplastics in water were not a health threat and this started a discussion on this topic. Of course we don't know much yet, because we have only just discovered this potential threat to our health. Here is a BBC article on this topic.
" And although the available evidence suggests the health risks associated with ingesting microplastics, and the chemicals associated with them, are minimal, the studies so far contain significant data gaps, which need to be corrected in future research, according to the report's co-author Jennifer de France.
"We need to know the number of particles that have been detected, the size of these particles, the shapes, as well as the chemical composition," she says.
So this report on the health consequences of microplastics is likely to be the first of many. Because microplastics are present not just in water, they are in the air, and in our food. In the next few years, the WHO would like to see a report looking at what this "total environmental exposure" means for our health as well."
