It’s 7:45 a.m. You grab a takeaway coffee from your local café, 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 microplastic 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.
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