Plastic bottles contribute to pollution on land and in oceans. (Photo: Streetwise Cycle, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)

Water is a necessity of life. But the plastic particles floating in bottled water? Not so much.

Testing the waters

Researchers from Columbia and Rutgers universities did a study on bottled water. They found that a one-litre bottle of water contains about 240,000 microscopic plastic particles.

Most of the particles were too small to see with the naked eye. The team developed a special imaging technology to measure them.