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46 The Authority | June 2025 one of those bottles may not have had microplastic, the others did. So every brand was shown to contain microplastics with an average of 325 pieces of plastic per liter – nearly 60 times more than what we found in tap water! Since our study came out in 2018, a team from Columbia University examined bottled water for nanoplastics. They found an average of 240,000 nanaoplastic particles per liter of bottled water – a nearly 3 fold increase as compared to the microplastic levels we found. Given that one large plastic item can form millions of microplastics, which can in turn break into thousands of nanoplastics, the dramatic increase in numbers as we go to smaller sizes makes sense. It also, once again, highlights the harsh reality: we can’t filter ourselves out of this issue. So what can we do? First, as water authorities, know these numbers, understand the issue, and share this information with anyone you can: tap water is better and safer than bottled water. Beyond this, each of us can make a huge difference regarding what is in our water by reducing our usage. Bring your reusable bag when you go shopping, drink from a refillable bottle, refuse excess packaging when you can, chose reusable and nonplastic when you can. Beyond what we can control through our personal purchasing habits, policies such as extended corporate responsibility need to be passed. These level the playing field and use market forces to reduce the abundance of plastic, while also taking the tax burden of the recycling infrastructure off the taxpayer in favor of the industries that profit off the plastics economy. Plastic pollution is a multi-faceted issue, with multi-faceted solutions. We can all be part of the solution through our words and actions but we cannot expect the burden to be placed on cleaning up and filtering out – the solutions have to be made upstream from that. S Dr. Sherri A. Mason (aka “Sam”) earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin. She completed her doctorate in Chemistry at the University of Montana as a NASA Earth System Science scholar. Her research group was among the first to study the prevalence and impact of plastic pollution within freshwater ecosystems. She currently serves as the Director of Project NePTWNE at Gannon University. For more information including videos on this topic, visit www.sherrimason.com . Plastics article continued from page 7. Fibers in tap water. Photo credit: Sherri Mason.