When you choose to drink a hot drink, this drink will too a paper cup inside is being presented. The situation has been the same for years at popular coffee chains, fast food restaurants, school canteens and many more.

But in fact, the scientific world has repeatedly revealed the negative relationship between hot liquids and paper cups. Come on, your paper cups are actually that how it can threaten our health Let’s explain it in the light of scientific research.

Paper cups spread microplastics!

The research we will refer to in this article, published in 2020 and 44 references and 58 cited There will be a study entitled “Microplastics and other harmful substances released into hot water from disposable paper cups”.

The research, published by Ved Prakash Ranjana, Anuja Josephb and Sudha Goel from Kharagpur Institute of Technology, India, was conducted using cups from 5 different paper cup manufacturers. The result was also quite frightening.

Before moving on to the results, let’s take a look at the materials used in a paper cup:

Almost every paper cup we have today is made with the same materials. The inner part where the drink is placed in the glasses is a type of thermoplastic used in many products.polyethylene‘ is covered. Some glasses contain a kind of polymer’copolymer‘ can be used.

This plastic dissolves when it comes into contact with hot water, mixes with the drink and ends up in our body!

In their research, scientists applied the temperature to paper cups. between 85 and 90 degrees put water. This water is in the glass in 15 minutes kept on hold. Thereafter, the results of the fluorescence microscopy studies were as follows:

“Paper cups released microplastic particles into the liquid. A disposable paper cup (100 ml) with a plastic liner is approx. 25,000 micron microplastic It can leak.”

So how do microplastics endanger our lives?

The harm of microplastics to human health has been one of the concerns of the scientific community for many years. Some of the work done so far serious hypotheses. gave place. Some of these hypotheses were as follows:

• Oxidative stress (in other words, ‘corrosion of the body’) due to a higher level of free radicals in the body than the level of antioxidants.
• DNA damage and inflammation
• If they are small enough to enter cells or tissues, they can irritate the cell because they are a foreign entity.
• Because they can contain carcinogens, they can cause many different health problems.
• Due to the strong link between human pathogens and plastic waste, various health problems can occur (In fact, in 2016, a pathogen called Vibrio cholera, which causes cholera, was observed to be attached to microplastics.)

But these and all other possibilities have not yet been fully proven. Scientists believe that microplastics are not direct also indirectly They dwell on the possibility that human life can be harmed. On the other hand, the damage of microplastics to microorganisms, the most basic building blocks of our life, has been proven time and time again.

So if we consider it only in the context of ‘human impact’, no tangible result has yet been achieved. But to take action now against the consequences that may be individually discovered in the future, Paper cups are best avoided. In this context, some big names have actually started the preparations:

Sources:

• Microplastics and other harmful substances are released from disposable paper cups into hot water
• The role of oxidative stress during inflammatory processes
• Plastic and human health: a micro problem?
• Dangerous hitchhikers? Evidence for potentially pathogenic Vibrio spp. ten microplastic particles