Microplastic Pollution in the Environment

Plastics are compounds that emerged in the middle of the 20th century and are formed of polymers of very variable composition; in recent years, they have become objects of common and unavoidable use. These materials originating mainly from hydrocarbons are characterized by an extraordinary diversity of their chemical composition and properties, giving them unique and distinctive characteristics in the life of modern humans. These plastic materials are distinguished by their rigidity, flexibility or elasticity, low weight, mechanical and chemical strength, variability in composition and color, etc. These unique and distinctive characteristics have led to their involvement in many fields of application, such as the aeronautical industries; automobiles; buildings; medical prostheses; computers; and the preservation and transport of industrial, food, medical, and pharmaceutical products. The use of plastics has become an obligatory passage of industrialists, consumers, and modern humans. With an index still growing, world annual production has increased from 1.5 million tons in 1950 to over 350 million tons today. These plastics are also characterized by their difficulties in recycling since they are difficult to degrade by microorganisms and over a lifetime of millennia; they are therefore a source of pollution and disruption of the natural and human environment, conditioned by their mass production for short-term uses, or for single use. As a result, a large proportion of the plastics used are released into the environment, where they degrade and contaminate continents, fresh waters and oceans. The man aware of the many negative impacts of this materials starts individual and collective efforts to reduce pollution at the source by calling for sobriety in consumption, in particular as regards packaging, by improving sorting and by encouraging industry to set up research and development programs aimed at replacing convenience plastics with polymers that are more easily depolymerizable; facilitating the transition to a circular economy by providing for the recycling of plastics from the outset; producing polymers with low environmental impact that can biodegrade under the action of microorganisms in continental and marine environments; developing an ambitious research agenda, nationally and internationally, to understand the biogeochemical cycle of plastic waste released to the environment; determining the fluxes and dimensions of particulate matter transported in air, fresh, and marine waters and predicting their fate; better assessing the impact of plastic degradation products on wildlife and human health by studying the behavior of micro- and nanoplastics at concentrations actually present in natural environments and by using epidemiological research; and exploring the possibility of blocking plastic waste by inserting it into long-lived materials, such as those used in the construction of large buildings.