Aquatic ecosystems such as freshwater, estuaries, and ocean waters have all been shown to contain microplastics. The consumption of food sourced from these habitats by humans is also put at risk by the presence of microplastic in aquatic systems, which also endangers aquatic creatures. There are several methods/strategies for removing microplastic from water sources across the world, including microbial degradation, thermal treatment, and physical approaches including adsorption and filtration. Which procedures/strategies are most efficient for removing microplastic from aquatic environments?
The question itself is of big societal value while we are taking a steps to take out the microplastic from the marine environment. This process can only be done naturally instead of artificially as it involves huge costs. therefore we have to think biologically and we should employ some marine species which can do this job for us. To find such a method, we have to make some biological experiment to identify which particular type of marine micro-organisms is very closely affiliated to microplastic. Once that experiment is finished following methods can be adopted to isolate microplastic from water.
1. First do an extensive biological experiment to find the best species who can fix an association with micro-plastic.
2. Secondly do an experiment on environmental parameters which influences more to these species.
3. Once you find the environment parameters viz. temperature or salinity or any etc, track these parameters to find these species, who are attached with microplastics for their shelters/mobility. Once these species makes affinity to microplastics, microplastics can be sinked to the bottom instead of floating or we can filter those species with high resolution mesh size taking environmental variable as proxies. Hope by this method we can take out microplastic from sea/ocean.
4. This is a hypothesis and personal perception. You may modify it as per your needs. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to answer asking this noble question.
Dear Doctor
Go To
Removing microplastics from aquatic environments: A critical review
Yusheng Pan , Shu-Hong Gao , Chang Ge , Qun Gao , Sijing Huang , Yuanyuan Kang , Gaoyang Luo , Ziqi Zhang , Lu Fan , Yongming Zhu , Ai-Jie Wang
Elsevier,
Environmental Science and Ecotechnology
Volume 13, January 2023, 100222
"As one of the typical emerging contaminants, microplastics exist widely in the environment because of their small size and recalcitrance, which has caused various ecological problems. This paper summarizes current adsorption and removal technologies of microplastics in typical aquatic environments, including natural freshwater, marine, drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs), and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), and includes abiotic and biotic degradation technologies as one of the removal technologies. Recently, numerous studies have shown that enrichment technologies have been widely used to remove microplastics in natural freshwater environments, DWTPs, and WWTPs. Efficient removal of microplastics via WWTPs is critical to reduce the release to the natural environment as a key connection point to prevent the transfer of microplastics from society to natural water systems. Photocatalytic technology has outstanding pre-degradation effects on microplastics, and the isolated microbial strains or enriched communities can degrade up to 50% or more of pre-processed microplastics."
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Mathematical Sciences
- Graphs