Microplastics profile along the Rhine River
By T. Mani, A. Hauk, U. Walter, P. Burkhardt-Holm. Scientific Reports, 2015
857 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microplastics result from fragmentation of plastic debris or are released to the environment as pre-production pellets or components of consumer and industrial products. In the oceans, they contribute to the ‘great garbage patches’. They are ingested by many organisms, from protozoa to baleen whales and pose a threat to the aquatic fauna. Although as much as 80% of marine debris originates from land, little attention was given to the role of rivers as debris pathways to the sea. Worldwide, not a single great river has yet been studied for the surface microplastics load over its length. We report the abundance and composition of microplastics at the surface of the Rhine, one of the largest European rivers. Measurements were made at 11 locations over a stretch of 820 km. Microplastics were found in all samples, with 892,777 particles km −2 on average. In the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area, a peak concentration of 3.9 million particles km −2 was measured. Microplastics concentrations were diverse along and across the river, reflecting various sources and sinks such as waste water treatment plants, tributaries and weirs. Measures should be implemented to avoid and reduce the pollution with anthropogenic litter in aquatic ecosystems.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ae7b02cc4ea26b1e846176fd89df97349d2f120c
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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
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Citations in the corpus
- Identification of microplastic in effluents of waste water treatment plants using focal plane array-based micro-Fourier-transform infrared imaging. (2017, positive): “Nevertheless, only recently studies started quantifying MP in major rivers e.g. the Thames (Morritt et al., 2013), the Danube (Lechner et al., 2014) or the Rhine (Mani et al., 2015), determined abundances vary considerably.”
- Microplastic prevalence in two fish species in two U.S. reservoirs (2020, background): “Microplastic concentrations in freshwater ecosystems can be orders of magnitude higher than in marine environments (Mani et al. 2015), leading to high potential for consequences for aquatic food webs.”
- Microplastics in freshwater and terrestrial environments: Evaluating the current understanding to identify the knowledge gaps and future research priorities. (2017, background): “374 Mani et al. (2015) and Yonkos et al. (2014) are among those who have found microplastics in higher 375 abundances at sites in close proximity to urban areas than at more remote sites.”
- Microplastic Contamination in Freshwater Environments: A Review, Focusing on Interactions with Sediments and Benthic Organisms (2020, background): “For example, the MP concentrations along the Rhine river increase with the river flow towards the sea, except for the tidal zone [37].”
- A first overview of textile fibers, including microplastics, in indoor and outdoor environments. (2017, background): “Some studies showed relatively high concentrations of microplastics in rivers and gave first insight on the role of urban areas in this pollution (Dris et al., 2015a; Mani et al., 2015; McCormick et al., 2014).”
- Microplastic fragments and microbeads in digestive tracts of planktivorous fish from urban coastal waters (2016, positive): “Mani et al. 13 detected opaque spherules identified as PE on the surface of the Rhine River 13 .”
- Ecotoxicological effects of microplastics on biota: a review (2018, methodology): “Alang-Sosiya ship breaking yard* Mumbai, India 81 items /kg sediment Chemical analysis by FT-IR spectroscopy and morphology using SEM Reddy et al. 2006 Recreational beaches in Mumbai (Aksa, Versova, Juhu, Dadar) Mumbai, India 7.49 g and 68.83 items/sq.m; 1–20 mm size particles with 41.85% of 1–5 mm ”
- Microplastics in freshwaters and drinking water: Critical review and assessment of data quality (2019, background): “Some precautions are less reliable but still provide some useful information on the level of contamination, like the filtration of air, or the sole examination of petri dishes/soaked papers placed next to the samples (Cable et al., 2017; Dris et al. 2015, 2018b; Estahbanati and Fahrenfeld, 2016; Hen”
- Microplastics in freshwater systems: A review on occurrence, environmental effects, and methods for microplastics detection. (2017, neutral): “As shown in Table 1, the researchers typically use net with 330 mm mesh to concentrate top water samples (Ryan et al., 2009; Hidalgo-Ruz et al., 2012; Eriksen et al., 2013; Zhao et al., 2014; Mani et al., 2015; Baldwin et al., 2016; Su et al., 2016; Anderson et al., 2017).”