Field evidence for transfer of plastic debris along a terrestrial food chain

By E. Huerta Lwanga, Jorge Mendoza Vega, Victor Ku Quej, Jesus de los Angeles Chi, Lucero Sanchez del Cid, C. Chi, Griselda Escalona Segura, Henny Gertsen, T. Salánki, M. J. van der Ploeg and 2 more. Scientific Reports, 2017

719 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Although plastic pollution happens globally, the micro- (<5 mm) and macroplastic (5–150 mm) transfer of plastic to terrestrial species relevant to human consumption has not been examined. We provide first-time evidence for micro- and macroplastic transfer from soil to chickens in traditional Mayan home gardens in Southeast Mexico where waste mismanagement is common. We assessed micro- and macroplastic in soil, earthworm casts, chicken feces, crops and gizzards (used for human consumption). Microplastic concentrations increased from soil (0.87 ± 1.9 particles g−1), to earthworm casts (14.8 ± 28.8 particles g−1), to chicken feces (129.8 ± 82.3 particles g−1). Chicken gizzards contained 10.2 ± 13.8 microplastic particles, while no microplastic was found in crops. An average of 45.82 ± 42.6 macroplastic particles were found per gizzard and 11 ± 15.3 macroplastic particles per crop, with 1–10 mm particles being significantly more abundant per gizzard (31.8 ± 27.27 particles) compared to the crop (1 ± 2.2 particles). The data show that micro- and macroplastic are capable of entering terrestrial food webs.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/594468879330c504154d0e38acf04d4f29c64201

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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

A Global Perspective on Microplastics (2020, background): “Emerging and poor countries are now adopting usage of plastics en masse (Lwanga et al., 2017), resulting in an upsurge in global plastic manufacture and consumption.”
Microplastics in Swiss Floodplain Soils. (2018, positive): “Statistical analysis was performed using only the characteristic bands 2980–2780, 1800–1740, 1760–1670, and 1480–1400.(22) The quality criterion for identifying a polymer was a hit quality >700.”
Microplastics as an emerging threat to terrestrial ecosystems (2018, background): “Thus, microplastics might also interact with soil fauna by changing their biophysical environment, with potential consequences for their fitness and soil function (Huerta Lwanga et al., 2017; Lwanga et al., 2016; Zhu et al., 2018).”