They are literally everywhere. And no, we are not talking about Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo with their never-ending Wicked promotion, but microplastics. These teeny-tiny shards of polymers are present even in the air, and we’re ingesting worrying amounts of tiny plastic bits that get deep into our systems, mainly coming from what we eat and drink.
Back in 2024, researchers in China discovered an easy way to get these particles out of water that actually works. The group tested this on soft water as well as mineral-heavy hard tap water. They mixed in plastic particles, boiled the water, and then filtered out the solid residue that was left behind.
The researchers noted in their report that the world is getting more worried about plastic specks slipping past water treatment plants, since drinking them might be bad for our health.
Compulsive tea drinkers might be onto something
The boiling and filtering method got rid of up to 90 percent of the plastic particles in some tests, though the results depended on the specific kind of water. The biggest plus, obviously, is that most people can handle this using equipment they already keep in the kitchen.
Biomedical engineer Zimin Yu and his team at Guangzhou Medical University explained that simply boiling tap water can clean out the contamination and safely cut down on how much plastic we end up drinking. It turned out that hard water samples lost the most plastic, largely because hard water naturally produces a layer of limescale when it gets hot.
You’ve probably seen this chalky stuff inside your kettle; as the water heats up, the calcium solidifies and coats the plastic, locking the fragments inside a crust.The team noted that the harder the water was, the better it became at trapping floating plastic bits when boiled.
For instance, removal rates jumped from just 34 percent in water with lower mineral content to 84 and even 90 percent as the calcium levels got higher.Even soft water, which doesn’t have nearly as much calcium, still managed to catch about a quarter of the plastic particles.
According to the researchers, you can then pour the water through something as simple as a stainless steel tea strainer to catch those crusty bits of plastic.
It might get yucky inside an electric kettle with all that limescale, but it’s doing its part trapping plastic particles. [However, the experiment is futile if we add a plastic tea bag into the scalding hot cup of boiling water. It seems like we might have to how back to brewing our pots with loose tea like a hundred years ago.]
Microplastics: more prevalent than TikTok
These microscopic plastic bits are becoming a bit of a headache for scientists. They come from our clothes, kitchen gear, toiletries, and countless other normal items. Unless humankind stopped producing plastic products, it wouldn’t stop
Because plastic is so tough, it hangs around in the environment for ages—and that includes inside our own bodies. Not only are most of us already carrying these particles around, but we keep picking up more every day since there are hardly any rules to stop them.
A 2025 review by The University of Texas at Arlington suggests that drinking water is likely a big source of exposure, largely because treatment plants still can’t fully filter the plastics out.
We’ve made roughly 9 billion metric tons of plastic since production started, and a lot of it has just crumbled into smaller and smaller pieces without ever really disappearing, creating a kind of plastic dust that covers the whole planet. The new review points out that while wastewater plants do catch a good amount of this debris, they aren’t catching enough.
Scientists have already tied plastics to shifts in gut bacteria and our body’s ability to resist antibiotics. The researchers want to see further study on how boiling water might keep this artificial stuff out of our systems—and maybe even push back against the worrying effects microplastics seem to be causing.