Tiny plastic particles float inside tap water, and it's still unclear how they impact our health. But boiling the water for 5 minutes could remove most of them, a new study finds. most of them
I read the article. Apparently it only really works with hard water - that's water with a high concentration of calcium carbonate. At high temperatures, the calcium carbonate becomes a solid, trapping the microplastics inside it, which is then removed from the water with a regular filter.
Probably for a very long time...we live in a very remote area...in the wilderness of Maine...our county has never allowed commercial development...the only things here are camps/cabins/homes.
It only really works with hard water, otherwise you'd have to add calcium to the water before boiling it, and they only tested it with something like 3 different plastics, and they're the most benign and least reactive ones.
This is not a magical solution to clean any water you boil.
Yes to the first, as for the second, who knows, but most likely not, as it'll be mixed plastics and you can't just mix them all together and make something out of them
I guess the author has just googled "define microplastics"... but when we think about microplastics in our drinking water we're not thinking about 5mm pieces of plastic.
A consumer grade filter will remove things larger than 0.0005mm.