Microplastics in freshwater systems: A review on occurrence, environmental effects, and methods for microplastics detection.

By Jingyi Li, Huihui Liu, J. Paul Chen. Water Research, 2017

1,828 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The continuous increase in synthetic plastic production and poor management in plastic waste have led to a tremendous increase in the dumping into our aqueous environment. Consequently, microplastics commonly defined as sizes less than 5 mm are produced and stay in both seawater and freshwater environment. The presence of microplastics as a new type of emerging contaminant has become a great issue of concerns from public and government authorities. The sources of microplastics to freshwater systems are many with the largest portion from wastewater treatment plants. The abundance of microplastics varies with the location, from above 1 million pieces per cubic meter to less than 1 piece in 100 cubic meters. Microplastics can cause several harmful physical effects on humans and living organisms through such mechanisms as entanglement and ingestion. The microplastics can act as carriers of various toxins such as additives from industrial production processes and persistent contaminants by the sorption in waters. Those toxins may cause great health problems to humans. A few studies on the fishes demonstrated that the microplastics and the associated toxins are bio-accumulated and cause such problems as intestinal damage and change in metabolic profiles. In studies of microplastics, fresh water is first sampled by the nets with typical mesh size of 330 μm for collection of microplastics. After the volume reducing process, the samples will then go through the purification process including density separation by such inorganic salts as sodium chloride and digestion process by oxidizing agents or enzymes. The sequence of these two processes (namely purification and digestion) is dependent on the sample type. The purified samples can be studied by several analytical methods. The commonly used methods for the qualification studies are FTIR spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, pyrolysis-GC/MS, and liquid chromatography. A tagging method can be used in the quantification study. Our literature study finds that there is still no universal accepted quantification and qualification tools of microplastics in fresh waters. More work is anticipated so as to obtain accurate information on microplastics in freshwater, which can then be used for the better assessment of the environmental risk.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0eb631ba0aaa6090335baae618c8f4fe073a4708

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Citations in the corpus

Microplastics in Freshwater: What Is the News from the World? (2020, methodology): “It is confirmed that the methods for the identification of fMP polymers are based on spectroscopic analysis, in particular, FT-IR and Raman for fMPs in water and sediment [34,55].”
Microplastics in freshwater fishes: Occurrence, impacts and future perspectives (2021, background): “Although the main research focus has been on marine species and systems, there is increasing knowledge on how MPs behave and their consequent effects in freshwater (Li et al., 2018; Strungaru et al., 2019; Triebskorn et al., 2019).”
Microplastics in freshwaters and drinking water: Critical review and assessment of data quality (2019, background): “Surface water is sampled by pumping, trawling or filling bottles or buckets, followed by sieving to isolate particles of the desired size range (Table S1) (Li et al., 2018).”
A Global Perspective on Microplastics (2020, background): “The occurrence of microplastics in freshwaters has been reviewed (Eerkes‐Medrano et al., 2015; Horton et al., 2017; Li et al., 2018; Wagner et al., 2014).”
Microplastic Contamination in Freshwater Environments: A Review, Focusing on Interactions with Sediments and Benthic Organisms (2020, background): “Moreover, most of the plastic widespread in the environment is finally deposited in aquatic environments [10,11].”
Assessment of microplastics in freshwater systems: A review. (2019, background): “2018); toxicity and methodology (Horton, 2017); occurrence, impact and analysis (Li et al. 2018); overarching discussion of microplastic pollution, however not focused on distribution (Wagner and Lambert, 2017) or focused in a specific geographic area (Fu and Journal Pre-proof”
Reporting Guidelines to Increase the Reproducibility and Comparability of Research on Microplastics (2020, background): “It is well known that microplastics have a ubiquitous presence in the environment, 7–10 and the potential harm microplastics can cause to species across trophic levels has been recently reviewed.”