Are you a Tea Lover? You may be Drinking Billions of Plastic Particles at Once!

Recent research by a professor from McGill University named Nathalie Tufenkji revealed that tea bags made of plastic, when dipped into hot water, release more than 11 billion microplastic and 3 billion nano plastic particles.

Reportedly, Tufenkji once noticed that the tea bag she got when she ordered a cup of tea at a cafe was made of plastic. She worried that the plastic bags could leech particles into hot beverage when dipped.

"I thought, 'That's not a very good idea, putting plastic into boiling water', " Tufenkji was quoted as saying by Washington Post.

She then sent one of her students to purchase some tea bags from nearby stores and began studying. It turned out that she was right. When they emptied the tea leaves and submerged the bags into hot water, particles of varying sizes made of materials such as PET, a kind of polyester and nylon were coming out.

Their findings were published in the American Chemical Society journal Environmental Science & Technology this month.