New Delhi, Delhi, India

We all love to get our coffee or tea as takeaways and have it while travelling or working, and the 'to-go' paper cups with plastic lids have made our lives easier. However, these cups may be the doom of our health, some scientists have discovered.

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According to a recently conducted study, when we pour hot tea or coffee in a paper or a plastic cup, the tiny plastic particles on the inside surface of the cup get dissolved with the drink, making it highly contaminated and harmful for one's health.

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The takeaway cups come with an inner lining that helps the cup stay waterproof. this lining also makes it difficult to recycle these cups.

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To conduct this research, scientists poured hot water into 100ml paper cups and left it for 15 minutes, as this is the usual time that people take to consume their hot drink completely. The researchers, then, checked the poured hot water under a powerful microscope and found an average of 25,000 microplastics per cup. They also found metals such as zinc, lead and chromium in the water, which may have also come from the inner lining of the cup.

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"An average person drinking three regular cups of tea or coffee daily, in a paper cup, would end up ingesting 75,000 tiny microplastic particles which are invisible to the naked eye," said Dr Sudha Goel, lead author of the study from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, a city in West Bengal.

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The microplastics that were found in the hot water were nearly the size of a micron, whose width is nearly 25 times the size of human hair.

"Microplastics act as carriers for contaminants like ions, toxic heavy metals such as palladium, chromium and cadmium," Dr. Goel said. "When ingested regularly over time, the health implications could be serious."

Dr. Goel's study has been published in Journal of Hazardous Materials.