Green Solutions: Bioremediation Strategies Against Microplastic Pollution-A Comprehensive Review

Microplastics (MPs) have emerged as a pervasive and ubiquitous pollutant, posing a critical global challenge to environmental sustainability. Its presence across terrestrial, aquatic and atmospheric environment highlights the complexity and scale of plastic pollution. This review provides a critical overview of the sources and the environmental pathways of MPs, with special emphasis on their classification, environmental fate and ecotoxicological impacts. Despite their diminutive size, MPs have an undue impact as they bioaccumulate in organisms and interact with abiotic components, leading to disruption of nutrient cycling, soil functionality and water recycling. The progressive accumulation of MPs has effectively transformed terrestrial and marine ecosystems into plastic sedimentation basins, necessitating an urgent reevaluation of mitigation strategies. This review critically discusses biologically driven remediation approaches, highlighting the role of biological organisms in degradation of MPs. Advances in biologically driven and genetically enhanced degradation pathways are significantly improving microplastic removal efficiency, thereby enabling scalable, nature-based strategies for long-term ecological restoration and resilience. Recent field-based experimental studies validate the potential scalability of biological degradation routes. Progress in the field of biology and genetic engineering have significantly enhanced the efficiency of microbial and enzymatic degradation, offering promising avenues for sustainable interventions. A bibliometric analysis of MPs remediation field is also provided to highlight new research directions, global collaboration networks, and thematic evolution within the MPs remediation domain. Unlike existing microplastic bioremediation reviews, this study uniquely integrates source pathway fate analysis with biologically and genetically enhanced degradation mechanisms alongside bibliometric mapping to provide a holistic, scalability-focused framework for sustainable ecological restoration. Collectively, this review integrates current scientific advances and proposes future directions for research on ecological restoration through the development of novel, nature inspired and sustainable bioremediation strategies.