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Tackling Marine Microplastics Pollution: an Overview of Existing Solutions
Summary
This review provides an overview of existing technologies and solutions designed to reduce microplastic pollution in marine environments. The paper covers approaches for both preventing further microplastic emissions and collecting microplastics already released into aquatic ecosystems, noting that microplastics travel through the food chain from small organisms up to humans.
Abstract Microplastics pollution is one of the main environmental challenges of our time, even though microplastics were observed for the first time almost 50 years ago. Microplastics—little plastic fragments smaller than 5 mm in size—are released from bigger plastic objects during their use, maintenance, or disposal. As their release is uncontrolled and mostly uncontrollable, microplastics end up in the environment and are easily transported across the world, polluting nearly every ecosystem, especially the aquatic ones. Hence, microplastics represent a huge menace for many living species: they are ingested unintentionally by smaller animals and transferred along the food chain up to human beings, even threatening our health. It is therefore vital to take action against microplastics and many technologies have been designed in recent years with this purpose in mind. This paper provides an overview of the main solutions developed thus far to reduce further microplastic emissions and to collect those already released.