by Arjun Walia, Collective Evolution:

Water is life, but you wouldn’t know that after witnessing what’s happening around the world. We’re destroying our environment and constantly releasing harmful toxins into the veins of Mother Earth, who can only take so much.

We have the ability and the technology to clean up our water systems and start producing our products and energy in clean green ways, but industry corruption and red-tape prolong the process. At the same time, disease rates are rising at an exponential rate, and it’s clear that multiple factors could be contributing to this, including a lack of access to clean healthy water, on a global scale.

A new investigation conducted by Orb Media, who shared their findings exclusively with The Guardian, had tap water samples from more than a dozen nations around the world analyzed by scientists, and they found that a shocking 83 percent of the samples were contamiated with plastic fibres.

The scientists discovered that European nations had the lowest contamination rate. Despite that, it was still high at 72%. European nations that were tested include the UK, Germany and France.

On the other hand, the US had the highest rate of contamination, at a staggering 94%. Plastic fibres were found in the drinking water of Trump Tower in New York, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters, and at multiple other sites, including Congress buildings.

This is a huge problem, and microplastic contamination is now extremely widespread. Our oceans are littered with plastic, which is killing whales and other marine mammals, and contaminating fish. Previous studies have shown when people eat seafood, they are also eating high levels of microplastics, not to mention taking in a lot of mercury as well. (See The World Mercury Project)

Dr. Sherri Mason, a microplastic expert at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who supervised the analyses for Orb, told the Guardian:

“We have enough data from looking at wildlife, and the impacts that it’s having on wildlife, to be concerned. If it’s impacting wildlife, then how do we think that it’s not going to somehow impact us?”

The piece goes on to site another study conducted in Ireland, where research also found a great deal of microplastic contamination in a number of water and well samples. According to the Guardian, Dr. Anne Marie Mahon, the lead other of that study, said there were two concerns here:

“If the fibres are there, it is possible that the nanoparticles are there too that we can’t measure. Once they are in the nanometre range they can really penetrate a cell and that means they can penetrate organs, and that would be worrying.”

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) a few years ago found that approximately 90 percent of the Earth’s ocean surface is polluted with plastic debris. The study was conducted by scientists from the University of Cadiz, Spain as well as the University of Western Australia.

The study is based off of 3,070 total ocean samples that were collected all around the globe, and the total amount of plastic in the open-ocean surface is estimated to be between approximately 7,000 and 35,000 tons. Although this amount is huge, scientists were surprised as it is much lower than the amount they expected.

The thing about microplastics is that they can attract large amounts of bacteria that’s actually found in sewage. According to Mahon, “some studies have shown there are more harmful pathogens on microplastics downstream of wastewater treatment plants.”

The Guardian lays it out well, and this is definitely something to pay attention to because the scale of global microplastic contamination is literally insane.

“Microplastics are also known to contain and absorb toxic chemicals and research on wild animals shows they are released in the body. Prof Richard Thompson, at Plymouth University, UK, told Orb: “It became clear very early on that the plastic would release those chemicals and that actually, the conditions in the gut would facilitate really quite rapid release.” His research has shown microplastics are found in a third of fish caught in the UK.” 

Unfortunately it’s not just in water, it’s in our seafood, and it’s even found in beer, honey and sugar. Paris researchers in 2015 actually found microplastic samples falling from the air.

Is Bottled Water Any Better?

Apparently not, this Orb study also found the same problem within bottled water, because, after all where does it come from? And what is it bottled in!

“We are increasingly smothering ecosystems in plastic and I am very worried that there may be all kinds of unintended, adverse consequences that we will only find out about once it is too late.” – Professor Roland Geyer to the Guardian, from the University of California and Santa Barbara, who led the study.

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