I find this article confusing. Can someone explain it in a simple language as if I am stupid or sth
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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Bottle caps are stored in big bags of some sort before being placed on bottles.
They have sharp edges and they scratch each other's paint as they shift around in the bags.
The scratching produces a fine dust of plastic/paint particles. The dust covers all sides of the bottle caps in the bags.
The caps are placed on the bottles. The dust goes into the liquid inside the bottle. People drink it.
So nothing coupled to the glass but rather the cap having a extra plastic layer on the wet side.
Sounds like we found the issue, now it's just a matter of producers improving the caps
Nah ill just spend $50 to have a Congress member introduce a bill to make regulating microplastics illegal
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Ha! Good one.
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No, the paint on the outside.
Yes. So many people are misunderstanding this article... The microplastics are on the inside, in the drink, and they are bits of the paint from the exterior of bottle caps that stuck to the inside of other caps when the caps were all jumbled together in big bags before they were placed on the bottles.
That would be far more intuitive, but it's not that - it's the painted logo on the outside.
In a bizarre twist, plastic bottles have been found to contain alarming levels of microglass.
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Step 1: Invent plastic bottles
Step 2: Pocket the cash
Step 3: Things got bad? Outsource the clean-up to the end user in the form of recycling
Step 4: Increase prices to account for recycling
Step 5: Laugh as the idiots actually recycle your shit
Step 6: Throw the whole shebang in the ocean or in landfills
Step 7: Pocket some more cash
Step 8: Pat yourself on your shoulder. You've done some capitalism.
You forgot the step where they invent a logo that looks almost the same as the recyclable logo and stick it on all plastics but it doesnt mean its recyclable but instead just says what kind of plastic it is.
Lets go back to corks
As someone in a cork industry, you really don't want that.
Care to expand on why? I've had corks dissolve and break if I didn't finish the drink quickly enough, just on liquor bottles that went unused for a year or so. Any other reason?
Slightly educated guess. True organic cork is produced by cutting the bark off specific trees. There are limited climates it grows. I would guess the scale with which we produce bottled drinks would require significantly more trees and labor that we currently have. And thus cork prices would skyrocket.
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Title seems misleading.
As the micro plastics were found on the paint outside the bottle cap. It seems complicate that that ended on the drink itself. Unless you are licking the bottle cap it doesn't seem that relevant.
No, the microplastics were found in the content of the bottles. The cap thing is where they come from. As a reply to you explained, the microplastic from the top of a cap is scratched by another cap and ends up on the bottom of yet another cap.
The paint on the caps also had "tiny scratches, invisible to the naked eye, probably due to friction between the caps when there were stored," the agency said in a statement.
This could then "release particles onto the surface of the caps," it added.
Paint scratches off the outside, then sticks to the inside and makes it into the drink.
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Wait...we not licking bottle caps anymore?!
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Man on the surface this reeks of inside payoffs. I guess the technicality is plastic caps on glass bottles?? Which seems weird and nothing I've ever seen. Unless they're referencing the seal on the inside of some metal caps on glass bottles? Either way, seems suspect. I'd assume that overall drinking from glass is safer, as with plastic on any timeline you're dealing with the plastic breaking down and leaching chemicals and micro plastics into the liquid, which wouldn't be an issue with glass.
Not plastic caps, plastic paint. The printing on bottlecaps is a polymer and it gets scuffed.
Odd. I would have thought that the paint, being on the exterior, wouldn't leak into the beverage contained inside the glass.
But apparently, they found that blowing air over the caps reduced the amount of detected contamination by 60 per cent. So it seems like an easy fix that manufacturers can implement inexpensively (literally just an electric fan)
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The paint itself on the outside of the bottle cap. The ultra thin layer of (apparently polymer a.k.a. plastic) paint that make the cap not just metal colored.
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Just pour it from the glass bottle to the plastic bottle. Problem solved
For the people in the comments who either won't or seemingly can't read the article: The paint on the top of the caps is plastic-based and before they're put on the bottle they're stored in a big jumbled up pile where the paint chips off and coats the caps in tiny flakes. When the cap gets put on the bottle, the flakes on the bottom of the cap get washed off into your drink. Studies show that washing the caps first dramatically reduces the micro-plastic contamination.
We just need glass caps then
When I was a kid they were made from metal
In a bizarre twist, glass caps have been found to contain alarming levels of microdrink.
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...do plastic bottles not have caps? I'm confused.
their caps are fully plastic, not painted metal. The non-screwtop metal caps need to be bent to release their grip on the bottle. That scrapes the paint off the metal cap.
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