BIOLOGY 1M03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Persistent Organic Pollutant, Microbead, Microplastics
9 Feb 2019
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Document Summary
Plastic contamination in water has been a worldwide crisis due to its versatility and capacity to consolidate toxic substances. Devastating impacts, such as ingestion and strangulation of the aquatic wildlife has prompted the majority of the countries to devote resources to eradicate this issue (eriksen et al. , 2014). However, pollutants known as microbeads have recently been discovered in the ocean and has proven to be grievous to the marine environment. Although microbeads are only 0. 5-500 micrometers in size, an american research team assessed that 808 trillion plastic microbeads make it to the american water filtration system in a day. Of those, eight trillion bypass water treatment plants and get released out into the lakes. As a result, microbeads have an immense surface area and are capable of absorbing persistent organic pollutants (pops) such as pesticides and flame retardants. Pops have high lipophilicity making them susceptible to biomagnification.
