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Characteristics of Microplastics in Sediment at Danang Beaches - Vietnam
Summary
Researchers characterised microplastics in beach sediments at Danang, Vietnam, determining their abundance, morphology, colour, and polymer composition. The study found microplastic contamination at all sampled sites, identifying fibres and fragments as dominant forms and linking plastic sources to local tourism, fishing, and urban runoff.
Microplastics (MPs) has been recently attracted the attention of many researches due to their existence for a long time in the environment. MPs are considered as an alarming pollution issue such as their occurence in water, sediment, and organism. In this research, the characteristics of MPs such as their concentration, size, shape and composition of the polymers in the shoreline sediments at the two layers (0- 5 cm and 5 -10 cm) collected from seven beaches on Danang city were investigated by the Fourier-transform infrared (µ-FTIR) method. Consequently, the average concentration of MPs was found at 5565 ± 2359 items 〖kg〗^(-1)dry weight (d.w.) in two layers. The upper layer of beach sediment (0-5 cm) has the majority of MPs with average abundance of 7679 ± 3363 items 〖kg〗^(-1)d.w. MPs had a wide range of sizes from 22.4 μm to 2797.2 μm with an average of 93.4 ± 18.8 μm in sampling sites. In addition, the range size from 20 to 150 μm was the most dominance in both layers. The morphology of MPs was found in the sediment with the most diversity of fragment. The variation of the polymer types of the MPs in two sampling layers was determined. Polyamide (PA) was the main polymer type found in both sediment layers while polyether sulfone (PES) was observed only at 4/7 sampling beaches. These results showed the diversity of the MPs in the two sediment layers of the seven beaches in Danang city and it is necessary to study on MPs pollution in sediment on beaches of Vietnam in future.