Take a look around you. Nearly everything you see contains plastics. They are everywhere. Of all the plastics though, the most alarming in terms of the devastating effect they are having on marine life and infiltrating our lives through the aquatic environment food chain, is microplastics.

Microplastics are defined as pieces of plastic 5 millimetres in diameter or less. They include microbeads in personal care products like facial scrubs, microfibres in polyester fabric, and larger plastics that have broken down into smaller pieces and are unable to be extracted by our cities’ wastewater treatment plants.

Microbeads can be found in personal care products like facial and body scrubs, and in abrasive cleaners.

On Aurecon’s Just Imagine blog in June 2018, small plastics were highlighted as a big problem. These are the plastics that we don’t see, that are damaging the world we live in.

This article considers the impact of microplastics as they enter wastewater treatment plants. Our wastewater treatment plants currently have limited capacity to extract microplastics from wastewater. So, what could be the answer on filtering these contaminants to help the future of our waterways?

What we know about microplastics

A great deal of attention has been drawn recently to microplastics in freshwater and marine environments, including a recent publication 'Plastics Pollution in the World’s Oceans' by oceanographer Dr Marcus Eriksen. The study investigated which kinds of plastic were most polluting the oceans. To the researcher’s surprise, significantly outnumbering bigger plastic items such as toothbrushes and the balls in deodorant roll-ons, were confetti-sized and smaller shreds of plastics.

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, microplastics not only contribute to the accumulation of plastics in the environment but, due to absorption, they can also contribute to the spread of micropollutants in the environment. Microplastics can act as a vehicle for the dispersal of harmful chemicals and bacteria. These chemical-laced particles can be ingested by small organisms, bigger marine animals, and then further on up the food chain and onto our plates.

This is an area that deserves research attention to truly understand the fate and toxicity of microplastics in humans as we eat, drink and breathe.

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