Year: 2020
Type: dissertation
Abstract: The use of plastic materials in the past decades has been an innovation that has created huge opportunities, but at the same time it is accompanied by a number of serious disadvantages.The large spread of plastic products, combined with their extremely slow decomposition is a very serious issue, which causes great concern regarding the accumulation of plastics in the aquatic environment.Fragments of plastic products that are smaller than 5mm in size, so-called microplastics, are of particular concern to the scientific community, as research results show that they have greatly penetrated aquatic ecosystems.Due to their size, microplastics can be ingested by a large number of marine species that are part of the food chain of other species, making microplastics an invisible threat to living organisms, including humans.Although investigations into the contamination of seawater with microplastics have been under way since about 2000, the corresponding investigations into freshwater contamination are not of the same intensity.Apart from the fact that some of the fresh water ends up in the sea, thus increasing the concentrations of microplastics, freshwater microplastics pose a great danger to the ecosystems that host them but also to man himself.In the present study, an attempt is made to analyze through a literature review the issue of the spread of microplastics in freshwater, their effects, their main sources, as well as the interventions that can be applied to reduce them.
Author: Καψάμπελης, Γεώργιος Ι.
Language: Greek
Subfield: Pollution
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7044345107