Science of Cooking

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From table salt to tap water to fish, microplastics are turning up everywhere. Now, researchers have found that these tiny specks are released in huge quantities from plastic containers when they’re microwaved1.

As plastic degrades, it creates fragments that are invisible to the naked eye. Kazi Albab Hussain at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and his colleagues measured the levels of these fragments that were released from two plastic containers whose contents simulated either watery or acidic foods.

In conditions that mimicked refrigeration lasting for about six months, one container released nearly 580,000 microplastics, which ranged in size from one to 14 micrometres, and about 21 million nanoplastics (particles that are smaller than one micrometre) per square centimetre of plastic area. When heated in a microwave for three minutes, the same container released more than 4 million microplastics and one billion nanoplastics per square centimetre.

The findings mean that an infant weighing 10 kilograms would consume up to 1.4 micrograms of micro- and nanoplastics per week when drinking water that had been microwaved using such container.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-02091-w

References Hussain, K. A. et al. Environ. Sci. Tech. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.3c01942 (2023).