Atmospheric transport is a major pathway of microplastics to remote regions
By N. Evangeliou, H. Grythe, Zbigniew Klimont, C. Heyes, S. Eckhardt, S. Lopez-Aparicio, Andreas Stohl. Nature Communications, 2020
821 citations recorded by the source corpus.
In recent years, marine, freshwater and terrestrial pollution with microplastics has been discussed extensively, whereas atmospheric microplastic transport has been largely overlooked. Here, we present global simulations of atmospheric transport of microplastic particles produced by road traffic (TWPs – tire wear particles and BWPs – brake wear particles), a major source that can be quantified relatively well. We find a high transport efficiencies of these particles to remote regions. About 34% of the emitted coarse TWPs and 30% of the emitted coarse BWPs (100 kt yr−1 and 40 kt yr−1 respectively) were deposited in the World Ocean. These amounts are of similar magnitude as the total estimated direct and riverine transport of TWPs and fibres to the ocean (64 kt yr−1). We suggest that the Arctic may be a particularly sensitive receptor region, where the light-absorbing properties of TWPs and BWPs may also cause accelerated warming and melting of the cryosphere. Plastic pollution is a critical concern across diverse ecosystems, yet most research has focused on terrestrial and aquatic transport, neglecting other mechanisms. Here the authors show that atmospheric transport is a major pathway for road plastic pollution over remote regions.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ffe374b1a2d46915278b4a9de842dc507bf9c416
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In Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
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In Pollution
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- Julien Boucher
- Karen Raubenheimer
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Citations in the corpus
- Twenty years of microplastic pollution research—what have we learned? (2024, background): “Points of entry into the environment include direct release into the air, for example, as fibers from textiles ( 49 ) or dust from tire abrasion ( 50 ); discharge to aquatic habitats as runoff from roads and sewage systems ( 51 ); direct introduction into agricultural soils, such as through the…”