What does it mean that scientists found 240,000 million nanoparticles of plastic in a typical bottle of water? The number is big and sounds alarming, but it isn’t very informative.

How many particles are needed to cause disease? What kinds of ailments are likely to result? Are there people who are dead now who’d be alive if they’d avoided bottled water?

These questions need to be addressed to before we can make informed decisions at the individual and societal level.

Should we ban plastic bottles for water and other drinks? Require health warnings? Would doing so save lives — or would it only take attention and money from more pressing health problems?

Nanoplastics are smaller than a wavelength of light — too small to see with an optical microscope.

Previous studies showed they were there, including one published in Nature Scientific Reports in 2021, demonstrating how to detect them in bottled water.To detect these nanoparticles, scientists can take advantage of a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering.

Shine a laser through pure water and you won’t see the beam. Add enough tiny particles, even nanoparticles, and the beam becomes visible. This also works in air – add nanoparticles in the form of smoke and scattering makes the beam visible.

More particles mean brighter scattering.The new study, published........

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