Takeaway coffee cups release thousands of microplastic particles |
It’s 7:45am. You grab a takeaway coffee from your local cafe, wrap your hands around the warm cup, take a sip, and head to the office.
To most of us, that cup feels harmless – just a convenient tool for caffeine delivery. However, if that cup is made of plastic, or has a thin plastic lining, there is a high chance it’s shedding thousands of tiny plastic fragments directly into your drink.
In Australia alone, we use a staggering 1.45 billion single-use hot beverage cups every year, along with roughly 890 million plastic lids. Globally, that number swells to an estimated 500 billion cups annually.
In new research I coauthored, published in Journal of Hazardous Materials: Plastics, we looked at how these cups behave when they get hot.
The message is clear: heat is a primary driver of microplastic release, and the material of your cup matters more than you might think.
Microplastics are fragments of plastic ranging from about 1 micrometre to 5 millimetres in size – roughly from a speck of dust to the size of a sesame........