Continuing Scourge of Microplastics in Water to be Gauged by New Research

Belinda Sturm is leading a three-year $300,000 effort supported by the National Science Foundation to identify how plastics are transported into waters.

She hopes to reduce harm to marine ecosystems by engaging municipalities through a full-scale sampling campaign and web-based database that is publically accessible.

A 2015 U.S. federal law banning tiny plastic beads in some exfoliating products left many sources of microplastics unaddressed. Today, microplastics — bits of plastic under 5 millimeters in size — in cosmetics, cleaning products and clothes still pollute U.S. waters and build up in oceans.

Indeed, one recent research paper estimated that by 2050 the weight of all plastics in the world’s oceans will equal that of all fish. Unfortunately, in both freshwater and saltwater plastics leach toxins and spread harmful microbes throughout aquatic ecosystems.

“Everyone is really reliant on plastics in their daily life,” said Belinda Sturm, associate professor of civil, environmental & architectural engineering at the University of Kansas. “We tend to think about pollution from the plastic that we can see — but we’re putting out a lot of tiny fibers from clothes washing and personal care products, and those accumulate in our environment and climb up in the food chain because they’re small enough to be consumed by zooplankton and fish.”

Now, Sturm is leading a three-year $300,000 effort supported by the National Science Foundation to identify how plastics are transported into waters, and she hopes to reduce harm to marine ecosystems by engaging municipalities through a full-scale sampling campaign and web-based database that is publically accessible.

According to the KU researcher, microplastics enter water systems in large part through municipal wastewater treatment plants that handle water from household and commercial drains. But scientists haven’t yet accurately estimated the amount of microplastics that enter the environment through U.S. municipal wastewater treatment plants. Sturm hopes the new investigation will change that.  

“We’re going to be partnering with utilities across the county, and they’re going to sample their wastewater treatment plants, and we’ll quantify plastics release at wastewater treatment plants,” she said. “We’ll utilize an EPA database that shows how much flow is released by all plants in the country, and we’ll use our measurements and this database of wastewater discharges to come up with national release estimate.”

Sturm said that wastewater treatment plants generally don’t make a special effort to remove microplastics from the water they handle.

“Right now, they’re not regulated or purposely removed from the water at all,” she said. “If they’re removed — it’s just happenstance.”

Thus, microplastics can enter the environment as part of plants’ effluent discharge directly into water ecosystems, or they can be included in “biosolids” that plants usually put into landfills or spread on agricultural lands as fertilizer.

“Biosolids, depending on the treatment plant, can be land applied,” Sturm said. “In this study, we’re going to be determining if those plastics just end up going into our waterways as runoff — that’s a roundabout way for our water to be contaminated.”

Once in the water, plastics damage aquatic life and eventually harm human beings, according to Sturm.

“These plastics can absorb other chemicals and can act as a carrier for drug release through the environment,” she said. “They can absorb microbial communities — a microbial community carried on plastic can be transported much farther than they otherwise would. From a human health perspective, microplastics can be consumed by aquatic organisms and move up the food chain — and eventually be eaten by humans.”

Sturm and her KU engineering colleagues, including Associate Professor Edward Peltier and several graduate and undergraduate students, will conduct experiments at the KU Biological Field Station to discover the extent to which microplastics in biosolids make their way back into the water due to agricultural runoff driven by rain.

At the same time, the researchers will work with municipal utilities throughout the U.S. to conduct sampling that will give a better estimate of the amount of microplastics present in their effluents and biosolids. Sturm said the data would offer the most complete picture of microplastics contamination from U.S. sources.

Read full article: Kansas University

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Taxonomy

• Water Pollution
• Pollution
• Conservation
• Oceanographic Survey
• Plastics
• Pollution
• Pollution