6 ms·
Drinking coffee or tea from paper cups may be bad for your health
- lenitabinol 6y agoSource: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304389420321087?via%3Dihub https://sci-hub.se/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
- kitsu 6y ago> Unused disposable paper cups sold by 5 different manufacturers were collected from the IIT Kharagpur campus While it still a valuable discover, I think it's too early to make any conclusions yet due to fairly limited source.
- Steve44 6y agoThis is just an analysis of some cups on a campus in India so I agree that it's interesting and worth looking at but possibly not directly comparable with products which meet EU / UK / USA food contact regulations. Sample B seems to have vastly mode copper and manganese leaching out than the other samples.
- arcticbull 6y agoAs someone who drinks 5 or 6 cups of coffee per day in various types of vessel, I think is safe to say: uh oh.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- toper-centage 6y ago> Researchers in India reveal drinking coffee and other hot beverages from paper cups can release tens of thousands of potentially harmful plastic particles into your drink. In summary, paper is not the problem here.
- airstrike 6y agoRight, the problem is everything is lined with BPA or lesser known but still likely very similar alternatives
- mkskm 6y agoI wonder if this still applies to certified compostable cups.
- misterhtmlcss 6y agoSomeone that knows please share an answer to this question, because I'd also really like to know too.
- Puts 6y agoI would think so. First of all bio-polymers is nothing new and revolutionary. The first plastics where bio-polymers like bakelite made from cellulose. The only reason we started making polymers from oil is because it's a rest product from the oil-industry and thus cheap but the inherent properties of polymers are the same whether they come from oil or plants and they typically don't break down in nature. The only positive thing with plant based polymers is that they could to some degree be considered carbon neutral. But there seems to be a lot of misunderstanding that keeps spreading because we inherently think bio-polymers should be bio-degradable because they are made from organic material. There is one bio-based polymer in particular, PLA that is actually said to be bio-degredable and used in paper cups but this is in industrial facilities and not in nature where the degrading process is at lest 70 years under optimal circumstances. And there are more problems with polymers then just the fact that they don't brake down in nature. They contain toxic and endocrine disrupting chemicals like BPA.
- airstrike 6y agoMy take is that plastics are the new asbestos. It's just harder to prove it, but at some point we're going to have that eureka moment Glass, silicone and plant-based materials are the logical solution here
- colordrops 6y agoWhy is silicone any better than plastic?
- polotics 6y agoSilicium is certainly going to be a lot more inert than synthetic carbon chains polymers inside you.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bcrosby95 6y agoI don't understand the attractiveness of plastic for stuff when perfectly good alternatives exist. People have been using glass for hundreds of years and I'm not aware of any studies showing it's harmful. We used glass bottles for milk when our kids were young. The only people to ever break them was us: around 3 total during the course of raising 3 kids.
- jmnicolas 6y agoIt's just convenient not to have to wash the cup. At work I have a glass mug for coffee, but I still use paper cups for water. If I replace it with glass it means I will now have 2 things to wash.
- misterhtmlcss 6y agoThat's some interesting calculus there. You don't want to wash 2 cups for a total time investment of 60 seconds, so you choose to generate extraordinary waste to save 30 seconds, damage the environment and your health. Makes complete sense to me.
- pdog 6y agoI had no idea what "disposable terracotta cups" were, but they're pretty interesting: https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2016/10/26/kolkatas-age-old-tradition-of-bhar-clay-cups-of-tea/ https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2016/10/26/kolkatas-age-ol...
- airstrike 6y agoGreat pics in that article. Definitely a nice refresher to my perspective...
- arcticbull 6y agoVery cool! The Bhar clay is dug out of the Ganges though so I’m not sure its all that much better for your health haha
- jamil7 6y agoThe first time I was in India as a kid (7) these were how you got a cup of chai on the train, you could just chuck it out the window afterwards. When I went back 10 years later it was all plastic cups :(
- neuralzen 6y ago>Researchers say these nearly-invisible microplastics are becoming a major threat to human health. They’re typically less than 0.2 inches across, but can be as small as one-fiftieth the width of a human hair. Less than 0.2 inches across huh...technically true I suppose.
- stmfreak 6y agoTIL, plastics degrade into millions of tiny pieces in only 15 minutes of exposure to coffee... and yet remain non-biodegradable for thousands of years. Seems only one of these can be true.
- gumby 6y agoOh no, the article says that the plastic could contain ions!
- lenitabinol 6y ago"Fluorescence microscopy indicated the release of approximately 25,000 micron-sized microplastic particles into one cup of hot water in 15 minutes" is directly from the article. They claim it's not just the ions.
- gumby 6y agoThey listed a bunch of things, some of which are in fact bad (although "it's the dose that makes the poison"). But "ions" is pointlessly generic and makes the whole story suspicious (after all what are you drinking when you drink salt water? OMG ions!)
- kgin 6y agoWould compostable cups still have these issues?
- wonnage 6y agoI'm not sure but it seems like biodegradable plastics are easier to degrade by design. Most won't degrade under ambient conditions (since you don't want your spoon dissolving into your soup...), but heat is one of the main ways to accelerate breakdown. I dunno if they might degrade into less-toxic compounds, though.
- ddmma 6y agoI guess the authors from this study had their names spelled wrong at Starbucks and got feedback to the industry.
- Kim_Bruning 6y agoA big irony of course is that disposable cups were once good for your health. Since they are only used once, they're fairly sanitary, and were the great pandemic startup idea of 1918. https://www.fastcompany.com/90520298/how-dixie-cups-became-the-breakout-startup-of-the-1918-pandemic https://www.fastcompany.com/90520298/how-dixie-cups-became-t...
- mkskm 6y agoI was bringing reusable cups to coffee shops frequently prior to the pandemic. Wonder how long it'll be before that's feasible again.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoMy local coffee shop has started using them again. With the other precautions they are taking it seems low risk.
- Steve44 6y agoDo you know how your reusable one compares to these PE lined paper ones? If it's one of the recently trendy 'bamboo' cups, I'm fairly certain most of them are made of predominately with melamine. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/reusable-bamboo-mugs-leach-dangerous-amounts-of-formaldehyde-and-melamine/4010950.article https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/reusable-bamboo-mugs-lea... > Overall, the BfR tested 228 bamboo mugs for formaldehyde and 180 for melamine. In each case, more than 35% of the cups released harmful substances in amounts that surpassed safety limits. Moreover, the amount of melamine – but not formaldehyde – the mugs released increased with repeated exposure to hot and slightly acidic liquids.
- mkskm 6y agoIt was the ecoffee cup from blue bottle. Looks like it is made from bamboo, may be worth reading out to them. https://bluebottlecoffee.com/store/blue-bottle-x-ecoffee-cup https://bluebottlecoffee.com/store/blue-bottle-x-ecoffee-cup
- 6y ago
- drukenemo 6y agoI’ve been following the advice of a dr who studies estrogenation and how that’s bad for both man and woman. He has a list of alternative products/materials you can use: https://www.ajconsultingcompany.com/whatiuse.html# https://www.ajconsultingcompany.com/whatiuse.html#
- abalashov 6y agoI’m no scientist, but this always seemed intuitive to me with the plastic-like lining inside disposable cups (BPA?). There’s just no way combining this with near-boiling liquid could be good. Of course, none of that has prevented me consuming as much coffee from disposable cups as the average urban professional type...
- EugeneOZ 6y ago”potentially harmful" and "could be dangerous" are not scientific proofs. FUD article.
- emanuer 6y agoI am asking this question out of true intellectual curiosity: Could someone please link me a study which shows strong evidence for micro-plastics being harmful to health, that goes beyond finding "potential" harm? – Thank you! Seriously, I am looking. So far every study I have found — linking micro-plastics to physical harm done to multicellular organisms — had the phrase "potential" (or a derivative) in it. I dislike plastic as much as the next guy, but I slowly get the feeling: the harmful effects of plastic have the same level of scientific proof as harm caused by radiation of mobile phones — inconclusive to likely _none_.
- 0xcoffee 6y agoI'm also interested in what happens to the bag labels in hot water. I'm always using these single use tea bags and the label always falls in the cup.
- rorykoehler 6y agoThe label has a slit in it so you can avoid this. Wrap the string around the cup handle (or spoon if you don't have a handle) and slot it into the slit to fasten. It will never fall into the water again.
- radu_floricica 6y agoThe question is VERY fair, and I don't want to undermine it. I just want to be the first to say that given the huge potential impact, "potential" is bad enough. When dealing with probabilities there are two measures that need to be considered independently: probability and effect. Traditional statistics multiplies them into "expected utility" and works just with the aggregated value. But that's tricky, because effect is not a continuous function. Imagine a pebble falling on your head plotted based on its weight - there'll be sharp discontinuities at "hurts", "commotion" and "death". At society's level there are also similar discontinuities. Something that may cause tens of million of cases of cancer over time should be in a separate category from a medicine that may suddenly kill a few hundred people, even though the latter has a bigger emotional impact.
- Cocktail 6y ago
- hyko 6y agoSure, because hot water is a known carcinogen. We’re in the grip of anti-plastic mania, to the extent that when heavy metals are discovered in a beverage container, the focus is inevitably on microplastics. Since we’ve no idea who manufactured these containers, and since they contain heavy metals, I’m going to suggest that they didn’t come from the likes of Starbucks.
- WalterBright 6y agoBottled tap water is an insane industry. Tax it at a dollar a bottle.
- WalterBright 6y agoWhen I microwave a TV dinner, I'll pop it out of the tray and into a china dish to microwave.