Water, salt and sugar packs must contain warning on presence of micro or nano plastics: Madras High Court

In a significant order, the Madras High Court has directed the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare as well as the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) to forewarn customers about the possible presence of micro and nano plastics (MNPs) in packaged drinking water, salt and sugar sold through Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) bottles and in plastic packs. A special Division Bench of Justices N. Sathish Kumar and D. Bharatha Chakravarthy, constituted to hear forest and environment related issues, ordered that the labels on the PET bottles as well as the sugar and salt packets must contain the warning ‘This water may contain micro/nano plastics’ or ‘This salt/sugar may contain micro/nano plastics’ in red colour font of size 10. The Ministry, as well as FSSAI, were directed to issue an appropriate notification, in compliance of the court order, within four weeks and issue instructions to all companies that sell drinking water, salt and sugar in PET bottles and other plastic packaging to comply with the new labelling requirements scrupulously. The court also called for a status report from the FSSAI by April 10, 2026. It was during the hearing of a case related to the ban imposed by Tamil Nadu government on single use plastics, amici curiae T. Mohan, Chevanan Mohan, Rahul Balaji and M. Santhanaraman told the court that the banned plastics somehow find their way into the pristine forests of the Nilgiris Biosphere and other parts of the Western Ghats and end up being consumed by the wild animals. The court was also apprised of an interim report of a research undertaken by PSG Institue of Medical Sciences and Research in Coimbatore on the adverse impact caused by microplastics. The report stated that microplastics were small plastic fragments and they comprise several elements, including Bisphenol A (BPA) which was a chemical compound used in the production of plastics. Since BPA could interfere with hormone functions, the institute measured its levels in cord blood. The analysis of 10 samples found the BPA concentration to range from 0.43 to 1.1578 µg/kg body weight in the samples. “The average concentration was 0.7194 0.2 µg/kg body weight. As per current guidelines, these concentrations were above the recommended tolerable daily intake (TDI) value of 0.2 ng/kg bw/day,” the report read. When the judges wanted to iknow if the Union Health Ministry or the FSSAI had carried out any studies so far regarding adverse impact of MNPs on human health, central government senior panel counsel V. Chandrasekharan said, the issues related to micro plastics in food and related health concerns were deliberated upon at the 14th meeting of the scientific panel on packaging held in Mumbai on April 17, 2025. He also said, a project titled ‘Micro and Nano-Plastics as Emerging Food Contaminants: Establishing Validated Methodologies and Understanding the Prevalence in Different Food Matrices’ was launched by FSSAI in March 2024 in collaboration w