Microplastic and mesoplastic pollution in farmland soils in suburbs of Shanghai, China.

By Mengting Liu, Shibo Lu, Yang Song, Lili Lei, Jiani Hu, Weiwei Lv, Wenzong Zhou, C. Cao, Huahong Shi, Xiaofeng Yang and 1 more. Environmental Pollution, 2018

1,003 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Microplastics are emerging pollutants which have been extensively detected in water environments. However, little is known about microplastic pollution in soil environments. In this study, we investigated microplastics and mesoplastics in farmland soils from twenty vegetable fields around the suburbs of Shanghai. In each site, three duplicate soil samples were collected from shallow (0-3 cm) and deep soils (3-6 cm), respectively. Microplastics (sizes of 20 μm - 5 mm) and mesoplastics (5 mm - 2 cm) were detected using methods of density extraction, 30% H2O2 digestion and micro-fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The abundance of microplastics was 78.00 ± 12.91 and 62.50 ± 12.97 items kg-1 in shallow and deep soils, respectively. While, mesoplastics were found with abundance of 6.75 ± 1.51 and 3.25 ± 1.04 items kg-1 in shallow and deep soils. Among these micro(meso)plastics, 48.79% and 59.81% were in size of <1 mm in shallow and deep soils. The main morphotypes of microplastics included fiber, fragment and film, mostly in color of black or transparent. Moreover, we found that topsoil contained higher concentrations and larger sizes of micro(meso)plastics than deep soil. In addition, the vast majority of micro(meso)plastics were polypropylene (50.51%) and polyethylene (43.43%). This study reveals occurrence and characteristics of microplastic pollution in typical farmland soils. It provides important data for subsequent research on microplatics in the terrestrial ecosystem.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/65890d16a9f84ca6fb88642203d06b2efd537dd9

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In Biomaterials

1. Yuhuan Sun
2. C. Adams
3. Fayuan Wang
4. Shuwu Zhang

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

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Citations in the corpus

• Interactions between microplastics and soil fauna: A critical review (2021, background): “Liu et al. (2018) estimated that in farmland soil in the Shanghai suburb, the abundance of MPs in shallow soil (0–3 cm) and deep soil (3–6 cm) was 78 ± 12.91 and 63 ± 12.97 items kg 1 soil, of which MPs were mainly derived from the use of plastic film in local agricultural production processes.”