Is There Plastic In Your Beer? Probably

Millions of tons of tiny debris from decaying plastic products have made their way into the world’s rivers, its lakes and its oceans…And now researchers have determined that micro-plastics are making their way into our beer.

And it’s not just that your IPA might have minute plastics particles in it, it’s that those man-made bits have an uncanny arability to attract poisonous chemicals “like a magnet”, according to the Plastic Ocean Foundation.

According to a new study published in the Public Library of Science’s open access journal, micro plastics found in the Great Lakes are making their way into that region’s beer.

 Earther  is reporting that a three-person team which specializes in plastics pollution research, “sampled twelve beer brands between January and April 2017—all whose brewing involved municipal water from one of the five Laurentian Great Lakes. We’re talking Lake Superior, Lake Michigan, Lake Huron, Lake Erie, and Lake Ontario.”

The researchers found that, on average, the beers they tested included 4.05 man-made particles, mostly plastic fibers, per liter. Which translates into 520 particles annually if you drink a beer every day.

The beers used in the study, whichwere primarily pilsners, were purchased from several states that border the Great Lakes, from New York to Minnesota. And ALL the beers that they tested were found to have micro-plastic particles in them.

But to be fair…if scientists are finding plastic in beer, the scale of this toxic invasion is already at a tipping point…IT’S INFILTRATED OUR WATER SUPPLY, it’s all over our ecosystem, and unfortunately probably in almost everything we put in our mouth.

But it’s still bad news for beer…