Microplastics in drinking water: As EPA considers testing, here's what Long Islanders should know

Microplastics have been found in bodies of water all over the globe, from the Arctic to the Caribbean Sea to Long Island Sound. They can leach into groundwater from those waterways, and from septic systems and cesspools, or from rainwater runoff that collects particles from streets or landfills.

And they make their way into our bodies from the food we eat and the water we drink, whether from the tap or bottled in plastic.

It's not clear if microplastics and the even smaller nanoplastics are in Long Island's drinking water, in part because testing is not required, and there's no standardized test.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced last month it will consider regulating microplastics — particles that can be smaller than a grain of sand, or even microscopic — as a contaminant in drinking water.

“I can’t think of an issue that hits closer to home for American families than the safety of their drinking water,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in announcing the move.

Water suppliers in the United States are not required to test or filter for microplastics, "which is why this is important," Judith Enck, president of the nonprofit Beyond Plastics and a former EPA regional administrator, wrote to Newsday in an email.

The EPA is required to name at least five possible drinking water contaminants every five years and to study their presence in drinking water, their health effects and whether they ultimately should be regulated.

The preliminary list released last month includes 75 chemicals, nine microbes and four broad categories of contaminants — microplastics, pharmaceuticals, PFAS and disinfection byproducts. The draft list is open for public comment until June 5, and the final list, usually significantly winnowed from the first version, is expected to be released in mid-November.

There are no guarantees that this first step will lead to anything. Last month the EPA declined to regulate any of the contaminants from the previous list, issued in 2022. And the administration also is trying to weaken regulations on PFAS in drinking water established by President Joe Biden.

Is Long Island drinking water contaminated?

Testing for microplastics is not standard practice in the United States, or Long Island.

“The New York State Department of Health is closely watching the rapidly evolving science on microplastics and supports the addition of microplastics to the sixth candidate contaminant list,” Marissa Crary, spokesperson for state Department of Health, wrote to Newsday in an email. At the moment, however, “no widely available standard method exists for evaluating microplastics in drinking water.”

Nevertheless, the Suffolk County Water Authority last year sent about a dozen samples to an outside lab to check, and the samples came up clean.

“We tried to come up with the worst case scenario,” explained Thomas Schneider, the water authority’s lab director. The utility took water from wells located downgrade of landfills and wastewater treatment plants, and from a very shallow well, for example — areas where microplastics would be most likely to seep into the groundwater. The outside lab tested the source water and water that had been run through standard filtering processes.

“In all the cases of the water we tested, they came back as ‘non-detect,’ ” Schneider said.

“We seem to be protected by the geology of Long Island,” he added, where drinking water is drawn from the underground aquifer system rather than from surface waters, which are more readily polluted with plastic trash, large and small.

What are the next Long Island tests for plastics?

More sampling will be done soon at about eight monitoring wells in Nassau and Suffolk counties, previously used by the U.S. Geological Survey to monitor other emerging contaminants, such as PFAS. The wells were selected based on existing water quality data and possible contamination sources nearby, such as sewage treatment plants that discharge underground, according to Tyrand Fuller, chair of the Long Island Commission for Aquifer Protection. Samples will be tested for microplastics and nanoplastics — particles that are smaller than 1 nanometer — Fuller said, and if plastics are found, they'll work to identify the source, based on nearby facilities and type of plastic. Results should be released by the end of the year.

Schneider said if testing were eventually required, it could be quite costly. The process is labor-intensive, he said, and would require testing equipment as well as HEPA filters in the lab to prevent contamination of the samples with airborne microplastics.

Some public health experts have suggested that California’s new microplastics program could provide a model for other states, and for federal regulation. In fall 2023, California began requiring large water suppliers to test for microplastics in drinking water, the first and still only state or nation in the world to establish such a mandate. But in order to do so, the state’s scientists had to design novel methods to detect, count and analyze tiny plastic particles. The process they devised involved special fluorescent dyes and computer software developed by an astronomer, similar to programs used to count stars in the galaxies.

What’s the harm?

Microplastics have been detected in human blood, bone marrow, breast milk, brains, kidneys, testicles and placentas.

There are not a lot of studies of the biological effects of ingesting microplastics, and because there are so many different types of plastic, infused with thousands of different chemicals, answers won’t be easy.

But researchers at the Environmental Health Nanoscience Laboratory at Harvard University’s Chan School of Public Health have found that nanoplastics can infiltrate the nuclei of human cells, which raises concerns that they could trigger cancers and reproductive harm.

Other recent studies suggest microplastics and especially nanoplastics could cause neurological damage, disrupt prenatal testicular development and lead to reduced birth weight.

Environmental health experts suggest the best way to reduce plastic in the environment and in the body is to produce less of it in the first place.

"Getting microplastics out of drinking water, while essential, is a tall task,” Enck wrote to Newsday in an email. “The most important thing that policymakers can do is adopt new laws that result in less plastic in our environment.”

What about bottled water?

Drinking bottled water is no way to avoid microplastics. (Furthermore, billions of discarded bottles shed microplastics that end up in water supplies.) Researchers at Columbia University tested water from three popular brands and found, on average, about 240,000 tiny particles of plastic in a liter. Roughly 90% of those fragments were nanoplastics, small enough to pass through the digestive tract and stomach and travel through the body.