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Microplastic Pollution in the Environment
Summary
This review examines the accumulation of microplastics in marine and freshwater environments, synthesizing evidence on how microplastic pollution affects aquatic habitats and human health while highlighting that research focus has disproportionately emphasized marine over freshwater systems.
Increasing quantities of microplastics in the environment have freshly been revealed to gather in the marine environment. Current emphasis has been on microplastic materials polluting the marine and aquatic environment, while the impacts of these microplastic materials on freshwater habitats, man, and organisms have received less or no attention. The chapter presents the spatial distributions of microplastic materials in freshwater and aquatic animals. Over 60 articles on microplastics in fresh and drinking water were reviewed and discussed. Information on higher microplastic particle concentration downstream of the urban and semi-urban regions with central wastewater and industrial effluent treatment systems was related to a community at the upstream site and location. The study indicated that microplastics can be in the form of a suspension in the water column in the streams. The higher concentrations of microplastic in downstream can be attributed to anthropogenic activities. The chapter discussed the results in respect of likely pathways of microplastic in rural areas against the immediate arable land. The chapter highlighted a number of essential future research directions in the aquatic system, which include surface water sources. It was concluded that microplastic materials in fresh and drinking water, as well as in the sediments, can be attributed to flow dynamics, anthropogenic discharges, tidal exchanges, and microplastic density. The presence of microplastics was proved by substantial relationships of microplastics with the stream pollution index, suspended solids loadings, flow velocity, chemical oxygen demand, surface loadings, hydraulic loadings, and the existence of several polymer categories of microplastic particles in freshwater and stream sediment. It was established that microplastic abundance in fish was correlated well with suspended solids, pH, and electrical conductivity, which indicated that these freshwater quality variables affected the bioavailability of microplastics to aquatic and fish.
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