You grab a takeaway coffee from your local cafe, wrap your hands around the warm cup, take a sip, and head to the office.To most of us, that cup feels harmless, just a convenient tool for caffeine delivery.
However, if that cup is made of plastic, or has a thin plastic lining, there is a high chance it’s shedding thousands of tiny plastic fragments directly into your drink.
In Australia alone, we use a staggering 1.45 billion single-use hot beverage cups every year, along with roughly 890 million plastic lids.
Globally, that number swells to an estimated 500 billion cups annually.
In new research I coauthored, published in Journal of Hazardous Materials: Plastics, we looked at how these cups behave when they get hot.
The message is clear: heat is a primary driver of microplastic release, and the material of your cup matters more than you might think.
Microplastics are fragments of plastic ranging from about 1 micrometre to 5 millimetres in size , roughly from a speck of dust to the size of a sesame seed.
They can be created when larger plastic items break down, or they can be released directly from products during normal use.
These particles end up in our environment, our food, and eventually, our bodies.