Abstract
Microplastic particles are found in environmental compartments all over the world and receive a great deal of attention, especially in the aquatic environment. Currently, a particularly high input of microplastics via Asian rivers is assumed, but so far, there are hardly any data through field measurements. Three rivers in South India were considered for this purpose to focus on their microplastic load. The emphasis was on the comparison of microplastic concentrations in urban and rural rivers. While two rivers in the megacity Chennai (Tamil Nadu) were found to have an average microplastic concentration of 0.4 microplastic particles/L, a rural river near Munnar (Kerala) had an average concentration of 0.2 microplastic particles/L. Rough estimates of annual microplastic discharge from the Adyar River (Chennai) into the Bay of Bengal are found to be as high as 11.6 trillion microplastic particles. This study should be one of the first baseline studies for microplastic loads in South Indian streams and should be complemented with further environmental sampling before, during and after the monsoon season to get more detailed information on the storage and transportation of fluvial microplastics under different weather conditions.
Highlights
Microplastics (MPs), plastic particles with a diameter ≤5 mm [1], are ubiquitous anthropogenic contaminants that have spread into the aquatic, terrestrial and atmospheric environment [2,3,4,5,6,7]
MP is released into the environment via various sources and entry paths [8] either as primary MP, already in sizes smaller than 5 mm, or it degrades as secondary MP from larger pieces of plastic into smaller ones [1]
The studies on the MP concentrations in three different rivers in the south of the Indian peninsula, two under different high and one low anthropogenic influence are reported in this paper
Summary
Microplastics (MPs), plastic particles with a diameter ≤5 mm [1], are ubiquitous anthropogenic contaminants that have spread into the aquatic, terrestrial and atmospheric environment [2,3,4,5,6,7]. Lebreton et al [11] used numerical simulations to assess the input of plastics into the oceans by rivers. They concluded that a high percentage of the plastic discharged via rivers comes from Asian rivers. The simulation was based on rates of mismanaged waste, population densities, monthly catchment runoff as well as the presence of artificial barriers such as dams. They did not include environmental sampling in their study
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