Secondary Microplastics Generation in the Sea Swash Zone With Coarse Bottom Sediments: Laboratory Experiments

By I. Efimova, M. Bagaeva, Andrei Bagaev, A. Kileso, I. Chubarenko. Frontiers in Marine Science, 2018

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Marine beaches worldwide are nowadays exposed to significant contamination by plastics. On the Baltic beaches, polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene are most abundant. We investigate the generation of microplastics particles (MPs, characteristic size from 0.5 to 5 mm) from larger plastic items in the sea swash zone using a laboratory rotating mixer filled with water and natural coarse beach sediment (marine pebbles). Inclination of the axis of rotation and the volume of the material were adjusted in such a way that mixing resembled a breaking wave in the swash zone. Plastic samples used were of the types most commonly found on the sea beaches. Experimental 2cm×2cm-large plastic items made of low-density polyethylene (LDPE) were manufactured from common new garbage bags (thickness 5 μm); those made of polypropylene (PP) and polystyrene (PS) were produced from single-use tableware; samples of foamed plastics were presented by cubes (with 2-cm sides) cut out of standard building insulator sheets (foamed PS). Four sets of 24-h-long experiments were conducted (for each type of plastic separately), with step-wise (every 3 hours) examination of the generated MPs mass, number of particles and their qualitative characteristics such as shape, quality of the surface, general behaviour while mixing, etc. Statistically significant dependencies are obtained for the increase in mass and in number of MPs with time for all four used kinds of plastics. Brittle solid PS is shown to be the most productive in terms of both mass and number of MPs generated. Anisotropic springing PP is the most resistant. Tensile tearing of LDPE and fragmentation of foamed PS to compounding bubbles/spherules show the variety of mechanisms involved in fragmentation of plastics in the swash zone. Increase in MPs mass and the number of MPs particles with time, as well the link between them, are important for field monitoring and numerical modelling. Potentially shape-selective operation of sieves during sampling and sorting of MPs particles of various shapes is discussed.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7773d27766817466615dc62a97629a14f725e969

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Citations in the corpus

The physical oceanography of the transport of floating marine debris (2020, methodology): “For example, laboratory experiments have been used to quantify the mechanical abrasion and fragmentation of plastic particles in the swash zone where waves repeatedly run up and run down on shoreface sediments (Efimova et al 2018, Chubarenko et al 2020) or in water (Resmeriţă et al 2018).”
Contributions of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy in microplastic pollution research: A review (2020, background): “MP undergoes degradation due to physical (wind wave action and mixing in-between the heavy and/or abrasive beach sediments) (Efimova et al., 2018; Chubarenko et al., 2020), chemical (UV light from solar radiation) (Andrady, 2011, 2017; Song et al., 2017) and biological (microorganisms) (Kooi et…”