Does Core Hydration have microplastics?
The short answer
Yes, like all PET bottled water. Worth one specific note: the wide sport cap is opened and resealed far more often than a plain screw cap, and closure abrasion is a real, if small, part of the picture.
Why Core Hydration scores 61
PET wall with months of contact before it reaches you
A large sport cap designed for repeated opening — more thread cycles than a standard closure
Purified water with minerals added back, so the water arrives clean and the bottle is the variable
Typically retailed unrefrigerated
Where the 61 comes from
Five components, added. The page renders the parts rather than a stored total, so the number cannot disagree with the reasoning behind it.
- Packaging contact
- 23 / 30
- Use conditions
- 11 / 25
- Measured release
- 18 / 25
- Polymer behaviour
- 6 / 10
- Processing
- 3 / 10
What material touches the contents, over how much surface area, for how long. Glass and steel score near zero here; a film pressed against fatty food scores near the top.
Heat, abrasion, flexing, repeated opening, reuse beyond design life. The same bottle scores differently in a fridge and in a hot car.
What a laboratory actually counted, for this product or its category. A high number here means real particles were measured, not that the material looks suspicious.
How this specific polymer behaves — brittleness, fat solubility of its additives, thermal stability, whether it is a polymer named in existing restrictions.
What happened before you bought it. Retort sterilisation inside the pack, hot-filling, and pressurised brewing all happen at the most migration-favourable moment.
What we don't know
No brand-specific test. Closure abrasion has been measured only in the general sense that opening plastic packaging generates particles — nobody has compared a sport cap to a screw cap, which would be a simple and useful experiment.
This section is on every page in the database, including the ones where the answer is comfortable. How evidence grades work →
Better options
Ordered by how much they change, not by how much they cost.
Steel bottle with a simple cap
fewer thread cycles on a polymer surface
Filtered tap water
the mineral profile is easy to replicate
Check the one in your hand
This page scores Core Hydration as a product. Formulations, packaging and suppliers change, and the specific item you own has its own condition — a scratched pan and a new one are not the same object. Scan yours for a score built from what is actually in front of you.
Scan my drinking waterSources behind this score
Each with the finding we use it for and the limitation that finding carries — because a study quoted without its boundaries is how this subject got so noisy.
- peer-reviewed2024
PNAS 2024 (Qian) — Counted roughly 240,000 plastic particles per litre in bottled water, about 90% of them nanoplastics that earlier optical methods could not see at all.
Limitation: Three unnamed US brands, small sample. It measured particles, not absorption or any health outcome, and the brands were not disclosed — so it cannot be attributed to a specific label.
- peer-reviewed2020
Sobhani 2020 — Simply tearing, cutting or twisting open plastic packaging generates microplastics at the opening — 10–30 nanograms per 300 cm of tear.
Limitation: Mass, not particle count, and it does not follow whether those particles land in the food. It is the reason cap and seal design belongs in an exposure score at all.
- peer-reviewed2018
Mason 2018 — 93% of 259 bottles across 11 international brands contained microplastic; an average of 325 particles per litre across all size classes.
Limitation: Nile-red staining and optical microscopy only reliably resolve particles above ~100 μm, so its counts are a floor, not a total. Lower numbers here do not mean less plastic than the 2024 study — they mean a less sensitive method.