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Sources, Occurrence, and Analysis of Microplastics in Freshwater Environments
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This review summarizes current knowledge on microplastic sources and occurrence in freshwater environments, noting that freshwater systems are major conduits delivering microplastics to the ocean. The review highlights that freshwater microplastic research lags far behind marine studies despite rivers and lakes being primary pollution pathways.
In recent years, microplastics (MPs) have received special attention from both the mass media and scientific communities. MPs are ubiquitously found all over the world, from overpopulated to remote regions, and until now, studies on MPs have mainly focused on marine environments. Freshwater environments are reported as the main sources of MPs to the oceans; however, knowledge of MPs in the environments is insufficient. This chapter reviews the potential sources and pathways of MPs in freshwater environments, and a summary of the analytical methods for sample collection, preparation, and analysis of MPs is presented. Furthermore, the global distribution of MPs in river and lake systems is also reported. This review shows that MPs have been found ubiquitously in freshwater environments from remote to densely populated areas, with the MPs pollution in China being reported higher than in other parts of the world. The main pathways of MPs into freshwater environments include effluents of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), and solid waste collection, processing, and landfilling. For the sampling of water samples, plankton nets or manta trawls with an aperture size of 333 μm are used in most studies. For the sampling of river bottom sediments, most studies employed grab samplers, while grab or corers were used for lake sediment. The extraction of MPs from sample matrices was conducted mainly with saturated sodium chloride, as it is inexpensive and environmentally friendly. The visual sorting of MPs is conducted mainly by dissection microscope, however, this is a time-consuming process and can create misidentification or underestimation of MPs. The polymer types of MPs are commonly identified by Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy. Since different methods are used for collection and analysis of MPs by different researchers, it hampers consistency and comparison between studies. Thus, the development of standard methods should be one of the top priorities for further studies on MPs.
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