Even Glass Bottles Aren’t Safe: Study Finds Microplastics in Your Favorite Summer Drinks

Figure 1: Glass Beverages

What Are You Really Drinking?

It’s the middle of summer. What drink are you reaching for? Maybe a glass of cold lemonade, a fizzy soda, or a chilled bottle of tea. Perhaps you’re cracking open a beer or pouring a glass of wine to unwind. While you might think that the sip you took was just to quench your thirst, what you don't see are the thousands of tiny plastic fibers and particles you may be swallowing, so small that they pass through your bloodstream and end up inside your organs. Microplastics are exactly what they sound like, microscopic plastic particles less than 5 millimeters in size (smaller than the width of a human hair or a grain of salt), and science is showing that they are entering our bodies from what we drink.

New Study Finds Microplastics in Bottled Beverages

Researchers from the French food safety agency ANSES have just published a new peer-reviewed study titled “Microplastic contaminations in a set of beverages sold in France” in the August 2025 edition of the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis. This study looked at whether common drinks sold in France, such as bottled water, soda, tea, lemonade, beer, and wine, contain microplastics.

Unfortunately, it didn’t matter what your favorite drink was, what brand you picked, or even what type of bottle it came in. They all contained microplastics.

Which Drinks Were the Worst?

Beer had the highest levels, followed by lemonade, soda, tea, wine, and then bottled water with the lowest levels. One of the most surprising results was that drinks in glass bottles, often considered a safer packaging choice than the plastic bottles or cans tested, actually had the most microplastics. The team theorized that the caps used to seal the glass bottles were a major source of contamination as many of the microplastic particles matched the color and material of the paint used on the caps, also explaining why the corked wine had fewer microplastics compared to glass bottled beverages with painted metal or plastic caps. To test this hypothesis, the researchers filled clean glass bottles with filtered water and sealed them using new caps. When the caps were not cleaned, the water inside showed a large number of microplastic particles. However, when the caps were blown out with air and rinsed before sealing, the number of particles dropped significantly.

Figure 2: Observations of cracks on new glass bottled drink caps in column A, and observations of yellow particles inside the drinks in column B & C (Chaïb et al. 2025). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfca.2025.107719

Should You Be Concerned?

Although we do not yet fully understand the health effects of consuming microplastics, research has already linked them to inflammation, hormone disruption, and the potential to carry toxic chemicals into the body. These concerns are especially relevant when microplastics break down into even smaller particles, called nanoplastics, which can enter organs and tissues more easily.

So, the next time you reach for your favorite summer drink, whether it’s that refreshing soda, crisp lemonade, or cold beer, it’s worth remembering that what you’re sipping might be more than what you can see. Microplastics are making their way into our beverages, not because of our day-to-day decisions, but because plastic has become deeply embedded in our everyday systems. While avoiding glass bottles or certain brands of drinks isn’t a practical solution, understanding how microplastics can enter our drinks is a starting point to address a growing problem we can no longer ignore.

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Chaïb, I., Doyen, P., Merveillie, P., Dehaut, A., & Duflos, G. (2025). Microplastic contaminations in a set of beverages sold in France. Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, 144, 107719. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfca.2025.107719
Ullah, S., Ahmad, S., Guo, X., Ullah, S., Ullah, S., Nabi, G., & Wanghe, K. (2023, January 16). A review of the endocrine disrupting effects of micro and nano plastic and their associated chemicals in mammals. Frontiers in Endocrinology, 13, 1084236. https://doi.org/10.3389/fendo.2022.1084236