Kenya’s Bottled water, Dasani contaminated by plastic, Coca Cola Agrees

Coca-Cola has admitted to the existence of minute plastics in Dasani water after a survey released on Thursday showed that the brand is among the 93 percent of famous bottled water contaminated by small pieces of plastic.

The number of plastic pieces found in every liter of Dasani water sourced in Kenya equaled 335. The Dasani bottles bought on Amazon had a minimum of 85 and a maximum of 303 plastic pieces per liter, respectively.

The survey, which was commissioned by Orb, a non-profit media organization was done by scientists based at the State University of New York. They analyzed samples of bottled water from countries that included Indonesia, India, the US, Lebanon, Thailand, China, Mexico, Brazil and e-commerce platform Amazon.

Although there is no substantial evidence that ingesting small pieces of plastic causes harm, it is a growing area of study that scientists are concerned with owing to the increasing plastic pollution and its effect on human health as well as the ecosystem.

Coca-Cola, in an interview with the BBC, said it had some of the most rigorous quality standards in the industry and that they used a “multi-step filtration process.”

However, the firm agreed that microplastics “appear to be ubiquitous and therefore may be found at minute levels even in highly treated products”.

Only 17 out of 259 bottles sold by 11 brands, bought in 19 locations in 9 different counties were free of plastic contamination.

Nestle Pure, the US brand had the highest concentration of10,390 plastic pieces per liter. The research made it clear that contamination was at least partially coming from the packaging or the bottling process.

The survey comes not long after a study on tap water released in September 2017 showed that some level of plastic pieces concentration.

“We found roughly twice as many plastic particles within bottled water as compared to tap water on average,” the study said.

According to an article on Microplastics and Human Health published in October 2017 in a UK medical Journal, Lancet, urgent measures need to be put in place to reduce microplastics and to understand their effects on both the environment and the human beings even though there is no one who has come out to quantify their effects on human health.