Maybe you ask the barista for cream with your coffee, and possibly sugar as well.
But new research shows that paper cup of joe you grab off the coffeehouse counter contains another ingredient, and it’s one you might not care for — trillions of tiny plastic particles that leach into your hot java from the cup’s plastic lining.
Single-use paper coffee cups are lined with a thin plastic film that helps keep liquids hot and prevent them from leaking through the cardboard. That lining releases more than 5 trillion plastic nanoparticles per liter when hot liquid is poured into a 12-ounce single-use cup, according to lab results published recently in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. A liter is about 34 fluid ounces.
“For reference of size of these particles, 1,000 particles with a diameter of 100 nanometers can fit across a human hair,” says lead researcher Christopher Zangmeister, a chemist and acting group leader with the Material Measurement Laboratory of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. “These are very small particles.”
The researchers estimated that by the time you’ve downed 13 paper cups of hot coffee or tea, you’ve consumed the equivalent of one nanoplastic particle for every seven cells in your own body.
The liquid doesn’t need to be boiling hot to spur this release of plastic nanoparticles, either, the investigators found.
“The number of particles released into water increase rapidly with water temperature from room temperature up until about 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and then it levels off and stays constant,” Zangmeister adds.
Hot beverages typically are served at temperatures between 130 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a 2019 review in the Journal of Food Science.
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The researchers were quick to note that the total amount of particles that leached into hot liquid from single-use cups fell
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