Impacts of Microplastics on the Soil Biophysical Environment

By A. A. de Souza Machado, C. W. Lau, J. Till, W. Kloas, A. Lehmann, R. Becker, Matthias C. Rillig. Environmental Science and Technology, 2018

1,456 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soils are essential components of terrestrial ecosystems that experience strong pollution pressure. Microplastic contamination of soils is being increasingly documented, with potential consequences for soil biodiversity and function. Notwithstanding, data on effects of such contaminants on fundamental properties potentially impacting soil biota are lacking. The present study explores the potential of microplastics to disturb vital relationships between soil and water, as well as its consequences for soil structure and microbial function. During a 5-weeks garden experiment we exposed a loamy sand soil to environmentally relevant nominal concentrations (up to 2%) of four common microplastic types (polyacrylic fibers, polyamide beads, polyester fibers, and polyethylene fragments). Then, we measured bulk density, water holding capacity, hydraulic conductivity, soil aggregation, and microbial activity. Microplastics affected the bulk density, water holding capacity, and the functional relationship between the microbial activity and water stable aggregates. The effects are underestimated if idiosyncrasies of particle type and concentrations are neglected, suggesting that purely qualitative environmental microplastic data might be of limited value for the assessment of effects in soil. If extended to other soils and plastic types, the processes unravelled here suggest that microplastics are relevant long-term anthropogenic stressors and drivers of global change in terrestrial ecosystems.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a86de25e79af3fb06d4070ea05dcceb7eddd667f

How researchers see this paper

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In Biomaterials

1. A. Lehmann
2. J. Bergmann
3. A. Wulf
4. Linshan Feng
5. E. Leifheit
6. Matthias C. Rillig

In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

1. A. Lehmann
2. J. Bergmann
3. A. Wulf
4. Linshan Feng
5. E. Leifheit
6. Matthias C. Rillig

In Pollution

1. A. Lehmann
2. J. Bergmann
3. A. Wulf
4. Linshan Feng
5. E. Leifheit
6. Matthias C. Rillig

Citations in the corpus

• Microplastic fiber and drought effects on plants and soil are only slightly modified by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (2020, methodology): “Thus the type and polymer of plastic and soil parameters were suggested to be important modulators affecting the composition of the soil microbial community and changes in their metabolic activity (Machado et al., 2018b; Liang et al., 2019; Fei et al., 2020).”