Assessment of microplastics in freshwater systems: A review.
By Chaoran Li, Rosa Busquets, Luiza Cintra Campos. Science of the Total Environment, 2019
754 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The reliance on plastic for a vast number of consumer products, many of them single-use, results in their continuous entry into aquatic environments. Plastic waste can fragment into smaller debris, some with a diameter < 5 mm (microplastics). Microplastics are of growing concern especially since 2014, however to date research on microplastic pollution has mainly focused on marine environments, partly because it has been mistakenly thought that sewage treatment plants could remove all plastic debris. To understand the impact of microplastic pollution in freshwater environments, an assessment of research on the sources, distribution and effects of microplastics, and trends in their analysis and policy has been carried out. Main sources of microplastic found in freshwater environments include synthetic textiles, personal care products, industrial raw materials and the improper disposal of plastic waste. Microplastic pollution is a global issue that presents with a broad range of concentration: for example, 3.5 × 10^3 microplastic units·L-1 were reported in sediment of Lake Huron, in the US and as low as 1.2×10-4 units·L-1 in countries with sparse population such as Mongolia. The main polymer constituents of microplastics found in freshwaters have been identified as polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS), and polyethylene terephthalate (PET), accounting for 70% of the total, each with a very similar frequency of occurrence. Despite microplastics being relatively inert, they are found to cause some effects in aquatic organisms. Future work should focus on monitoring microplastic pollution in regions from where there is currently scarce published data (e.g. South America, Africa and North Asia) and the study of their sources, stability, transport and effects to freshwater ecosystems. The establishment of standardized monitoring methods will allow for the comparison of data from different geographic areas. This information will inform measures to reduce the release and occurrence of microplastics in aquatic environments.
Subfields: Biomaterials, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17fc2420edf1c99dcb17bf1249f94b2c33753286
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Citations in the corpus
- Microplastics with adsorbed contaminants: Mechanisms and Treatment (2021, positive): “…(DM) has been pplied, based on the principle that the formation of a cake layer DM) plays a role as a secondary membrane filter; yet, membrane erformance becomes less effective because of dense fouling and hicker layers compared those in MF/UF processes ( Poerio et al., 2019 ; i et al., 2018d ).”
- Microplastics in Freshwater: What Is the News from the World? (2020, methodology): “In a recent review, North America is proposed as one of the most concentrated areas of fMP occurrence [55] in contrast to the results of Wu et al.”
- Surgical face masks as a potential source for microplastic pollution in the COVID-19 scenario (2020, neutral): “…world including developing countries are using in mass. World Health Organization (WHO) detected Covid-19 in China in December 2019 and its declaration as a pandemic and various measures have been put in place in different all over the world to control the virus further spread (Xu and Li, 2020).”