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Treatment characteristics of microplastics at biological sewage treatment facilities in Korea
Summary
A study of two biological sewage treatment facilities in South Korea found that microplastics were present in influent at high concentrations but that treatment removed 80-95% of particles, with sludge as the main repository for retained microplastics. The results confirm that while treatment significantly reduces microplastic discharge, effluent still releases large numbers of particles into receiving waters.
Microplastics that are contained in household dust, personal care products, and other factors, are discharged into sewage treatment facilities (STF). While these microplastics are treated at the STF with a high treatment efficiency through settling, precipitation, filtering, and other treatments, considering the large amount of effluent, large quantities of microplastics are still discharged into marine environments. In this study, biological STF using the anaerobic-anoxic-aerobic (A2O), sequence batch reactor (SBR), and the Media processes were investigated to confirm the efficiency of these treatments and the associated amounts of microplastics released for each process. The three investigated processes were found to have treatment efficiencies of about 98% or more. However, due to the large amount of effluent, more than four billion pieces of microplastic were released each year in each facility. Thus, even though biological STF show high treatment efficiencies, substantially large amounts of microplastics are still released into the marine environment.