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The influence of additives on the fate of plastics in the marine environment, exemplified with barium sulphate
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Plastic additives — particularly barium-based fillers — can significantly change how polyethylene and polypropylene behave in the ocean, causing them to sink rather than float. This means some plastic pollution may accumulate on the seafloor at higher rates than previously assumed.
With an inherent density marginally below that of seawater, polyolefins (polyethylene-polypropylene) are predicted to float or undergo beaching in the marine environment. Polyolefins commonly observed on the seabed, therefore, require additional considerations that are usually based around increasing density through fouling or packaging into sinking faecal matter. Here, however, we propose that the presence of additives is of least equal significance to the behaviour of such plastics in marine systems. We compared barium, present largely as the filler, BaSO4 (density = 4.5 g cm-3), in consumer and beached plastics and established that the metal was more abundant and occurred at higher concentrations in the former samples, consistent with the environmental fractionation of plastics based on additive content. Significantly, the Ba content of polyolefins required to confer a density above seawater is about 13,000 mg kg-1, a value that was exceeded in many consumer plastics but never observed in beached samples.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.