Learn › How plastic gets into your food
Most of the plastic people take in doesn't come from "pollution" in the abstract — it comes from a handful of ordinary products that touch food and drink every day. These are the routes researchers have actually measured, with the numbers.
The famous one. In 2019, McGill University researchers brewed premium "silky" plastic tea bags at normal brewing temperature and counted what came out: roughly 11.6 billion microplastic particles and 3.1 billion nanoplastic particles released into a single cup — thousands of times more than had been measured in other foods. The bags were nylon and PET mesh; heat is what makes them shed. Paper and stitched-cotton tea bags don't have this problem.
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A 2024 Columbia University study in PNAS used a new laser-imaging technique to count particles in bottled water down to nanoplastic size, and found an average of about 240,000 plastic particles per liter — 10 to 100 times higher than older estimates, with roughly 90% of them nanoplastics small enough to be previously invisible to measurement. (Counting methods at this scale are new and debated; the exact figure varies by technique. The direction — bottled water carries far more plastic than anyone thought — is consistent across studies.)
An earlier estimate published in Environmental Science & Technology put it in everyday terms: someone who drinks only bottled water may take in around 90,000 extra microplastic particles a year, versus about 4,000 for someone drinking tap.
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Every knife stroke on a plastic board shaves off particles. A 2023 study in Environmental Science & Technology estimated that ordinary chopping on a polyethylene board could release on the order of 14–79 million microplastic particles per year into food being prepared. (The same study's cell tests found no toxicity over 72 hours — we tell you that too, because the point is what's measured, not what's scariest.) Wood boards shed wood.
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Polyester, acrylic, and nylon clothing sheds plastic microfibers every wash. The benchmark study from the University of Plymouth measured roughly 140,000–730,000 fibers released per typical 6 kg wash load, with acrylic shedding the most, then polyester. Those fibers exit through wastewater into rivers, oceans, and the food chain — and synthetic textiles are also a major source of the plastic in household dust. This is why worn-on-skin, washed-weekly basics are the highest-impact clothing to swap to natural fibers.
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Notice what these have in common: heat, friction, and time. Plastic sheds most when it's heated (tea bags, food containers), scraped (cutting boards), or agitated (laundry). That's also what makes this fixable — the biggest measured sources are specific, everyday products with genuinely good non-plastic versions. We've written up what the research says about how much switching actually helps.
We're not doctors, and this isn't medical advice — it's a plain-language summary of published research, linked below so you can read it yourself.