The 6th IFB Seminar

The 6th IFB Seminar took place in the conference room of the Institute of Freshwater Biology.

Title: Overview on microplastic pollution of freshwater ecosystems: knowledge gaps and future perspectives

Lecturer: Alessandra Cera

Affiliation: IFB, Nagano University

Abstract: Plastics are a wide range of synthetic polymers having different chemical characteristics and physical properties. Among plastics, microplastics (plastics ranging from 1 µm to 5 mm) are globally recognised pollutants contaminating soil, air, and water. Research has established that microplastics and their additives negatively impact organisms; also, microplastics can be a carrier of chemicals, heavy metals, adsorbed on their hydrophilic surface. However, the environmental threshold to which they can be considered a threat to the ecosystem functionality has not yet been established. The understanding of the dynamic biogeological process of microplastic dispersal in fresh waters is an ongoing field of research which has made significant improvements in recent years in the assessment of sources, sinks, risk for organisms. Some focal points of the scientific literature are on the role of wastewater treatment plant outflow discharges to the increase of contamination by microplastics of rivers; the biodiversity of “plastisphere”, defined as the community inhabiting buoyant plastics; microplastic sedimentation pattern. To date, there is no technique to neither remove microplastic and reduce its bioavailability from the environment so the factors regulating their entrapment in sediment is a topic of growing interest. By a management point of view, new policies and recommendations aim at limiting the industrial production of microplastics by factories, but the creation of microplastics by the fragmentation of larger plastics, macroplastics (plastics > 5 mm), due to exogenous factors, such as solar radiation and wind, is still a topic to be more thoroughly engaged in future regarding both its qualitative and quantitative data.