Does Smartwater have microplastics?
The short answer
Yes, on the same basis as every other PET bottle — and no, there is no Smartwater-specific laboratory test, despite several sites quoting one. Vapour distillation removes minerals from the water; it does nothing about the bottle the water then sits in.
PET plastic bottle format profile
Why Smartwater scores 60
PET bottle wall with months of liquid contact before it reaches you
Vapour-distilled water is purified before filling, so anything measured in the bottle came from the bottle
Cap and neck-thread abrasion at every open and close
Sold heavily in warm-shelf convenience retail rather than chilled
Where the 60 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
- 10 / 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
You will find "Smartwater: 325 particles per litre" quoted around the web, including in tables we ourselves published earlier. That number is the all-brand average from Mason 2018 — Smartwater was not one of the eleven brands tested. We have corrected our own table. No brand-specific count exists.
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 in glass
if the appeal is a premium bottle on the desk
Filtered tap in a steel bottle
cheaper per litre by two orders of magnitude
Mountain Valley glass
the closest like-for-like still water in glass
Check the one in your hand
This page scores Smartwater 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-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-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.