Does San Pellegrino (glass bottle) have microplastics?
The short answer
Yes but at a small fraction of a plastic bottle, and this is one of the few glass products with brand-level data behind it — San Pellegrino was in the eleven-brand Mason 2018 cohort, where its glass format was among the lowest results.
Glass bottle or jar format profile
Why San Pellegrino (glass bottle) scores 20
Glass water-contact surface, so the bottle wall contributes essentially nothing
Brand was in a tested cohort, which is rare for a glass product
Carbonation keeps the contents under pressure, which matters in plastic and barely at all in glass
Crown caps have a thin polymer sealing liner; screw-cap formats have more
Where the 20 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
- 3 / 30
- Use conditions
- 6 / 25
- Measured release
- 8 / 25
- Polymer behaviour
- 1 / 10
- Processing
- 2 / 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
San Pellegrino is also sold in PET, and that version is a different product for this purpose. The glass result also predates nanoplastic-capable methods — no one has re-run a glass bottle with Raman or SRS microscopy, so the sub-micron fraction in glass-bottled water is genuinely unmeasured.
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.
Topo Chico glass
the same idea, usually cheaper
Home carbonation with a glass bottle
the CO2 line is the only plastic and it never touches the water
Check the one in your hand
This page scores San Pellegrino (glass bottle) 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-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.
- peer-reviewed2018
Schymanski 2018 — Compared formats head to head: single-use PET averaged 14 particles/L, returnable PET 118/L, glass bottles 50/L and beverage cartons 11/L.
Limitation: The glass result is the one people skip. Glass was not zero — particles came from the cap and the filling line, not the bottle wall. Small sample per format.