Microplastic pollution in agricultural soils and abatement measuresa model-based assessment for Germany

Microplastic pollution in soils is a recent challenge for environmental science and policy. Designing and implementing policies to mitigate microplastic emissions requires scientific data, which is rare because analytical methods to detect and quantify microplastics in soils are still under development. Using a normative emission model we simulate for the year 2020 a microplastic concentration in agricultural soil between 40 and 50 mg/kg, which we expect to find on 2% of Germany's utilized agricultural area. On around 20% of utilized agricultural area, we expect any microplastic pollution present from sludge or microplastic. At the regional scale, we expect the difference of pollution between sites to be close to urban regions and less urban regions. We find that for sludge, thermal recycling (end-of-the-pipe treatment) reduces the microplastic emissions more cost-efficiently and effectively than filtering the microplastic emissions from the waste-water. For compost, the application of detection systems and quality control for the biowaste collection (source of pollution) is a more costefficient abatement measure than thermal recycling. This approach is of comparable effectiveness to thermal recycling. The presented results must be updated with future research results. But these model results can contribute to research on reducing microplastic pollution in agricultural soils.