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Babies May Consume a Million Microplastic Particles Each Day From Bottles, Study Finds - ScienceAlert

Babies May Consume a Million Microplastic Particles Each Day From Bottles, Study Finds - ScienceAlert

Babies May Consume a Million Microplastic Particles Each Day From Bottles, Study Finds - ScienceAlert
Oct 20, 2020 1 min, 12 secs

Another place you'd expect to find polypropylene is in baby feeding bottles.

But in new research, we've shown that baby formula preparation with polypropylene bottles exposes infants around the world to an average of 1 million microplastic particles per day.

We began testing other polypropylene containers, such as plastic bottles, with liquids at room temperature and found very few microplastic particles were released with each litre, from none at all to a few hundred.

We wanted to design an experiment that could test how a single polypropylene product responds to regular heating, and hit upon the idea of using baby feeding bottles.

We decided to test these bottles by choosing ten polypropylene baby bottles and following the World Health Organization's 2007 guidelines for preparing bottle feeding formula at home.

We tested how many microplastics were released while following these steps, including cleaning, sterilising and mixing liquids in each of the ten bottles, and found that they released up to 16 million particles per litre of 70°C water.

When the temperature of the water was raised from the recommended 70°C to 95°C – the temperature of recently boiled water – the release of microplastics increased from six million particles per litre to 55 million.

We estimated how exposed 12-month-old infants are likely to be in 48 regions across the world by comparing the average release rates of microplastics from feeding bottles, the market share of plastic bottles, rates of bottle feeding and how much milk babies tend to drink daily.

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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