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Water hyacinths retain river plastics
Summary
Researchers investigated how water hyacinths, an invasive aquatic plant common in tropical rivers, interact with floating plastic debris. They found that dense water hyacinth patches efficiently trap surface plastics, potentially influencing whether plastic waste reaches the ocean. The study suggests that while water hyacinths are typically considered a nuisance species, they may play an unintended role in retaining river plastics.
Rivers represent one of the main conduits for the delivery of plastics to the sea, while also functioning as reservoirs for plastic retention. In tropical regions, rivers are exposed to both high levels of plastic pollution and invasion of water hyacinths. This aquatic plant forms dense patches at the river surface that drift due to winds and currents. Recent work suggests that water hyacinths play a crucial role in influencing plastic transport, by efficiently trapping the majority of surface plastic within their patches. However, a comprehensive understanding of the interaction between water hyacinths and plastics is still lacking. We hypothesize that the properties relevant to plastic transport change due to their trapping in water hyacinth patches. In particular, the length scale, defined as the characteristic size of the transported material, is a key property in understanding how materials move within rivers. Here, we show that water hyacinth patches trap on average 54%-77% of all observed surface plastics at the measurement site (Saigon river, Vietnam). Both temporally and spatially, we found that plastic and water hyacinth presence co-occur. The formation of plastic-plant aggregates carries significant implications for both clean-up and monitoring purposes, as these aggregates can be detected from space and need to be jointly removed. In addition, the length scale of trapped plastics (∼4.0 m) was found to be forty times larger than that of open water plastics (∼0.1 m). The implications of this increased length scale for plastic transport dynamics are yet to be fully understood, calling for further investigation into travel distances and trajectories. The effects of plastic trapping likely extend to other key properties of plastic-plant aggregates, such as effective buoyancy and mass. Given the prevalence of plant invasion and plastic pollution in rivers worldwide, this research offers valuable insights into the complex environmental challenges faced by numerous rivers.