I have been googling how micro plastics get into our bodies and I get a lot of articles saying it’s from drinking and eating from plastic but nothing explains HOW the micro plastics are actually leaving the containers and getting into us. I specifically want to understand how drinking out of a plastic bottle transfers plastic to our body? I understand microwaving plastic leaches chemicals into food but I don’t get how drinking cold water from plastic could transfer the micro plastic to our bodies.
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You coming at this problem from the wrong angle. You thinking about whole, large pieces of plastic instantaneously breaking down and entering your body e.g. drinking from a water bottle. While this can happen on a very microscopic scale, this isn’t the main problem. The issue comes from the fact that plastic does not degrade over human life times, it only breaks down into smaller and smaller particles. Once smaller enough microplastics can become airborne, you can breath them in, they can settle on food crops that we consume, they might even be in your drinking water.
Now scale this problem up into the marine food web. Small marine organisms (e.g. krill) might consume microplastics. These smaller organisms get eaten by bigger ones (fish). The fish end up having many times more microplastics in them because they consume a lot of krill. Then a larger fish will eat that fish ending up with even more microplastics in it’s system. This is called bioaccumulation and it’s a major factor in why humans should avoid eating too much large, fatty fish because they contain high amounts of mercury. It’s the exact same process but with plastics.
It’s not that we are directly consuming plastic, it’s the fact that what we eat and drink contains potentially thousands of small plastic particles that have built up over time in our food/water sources
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