“Alarming” microplastic levels have been found in the main rivers of the entire Chordination of Europe to scientists in 14 studies published simultaneously on Monday.
“Pollution is a present in all European rivers,” said French scientist Jean-François Ghiglione, who coordinated large-scale operation on nine main rivers from Thames to Tiber.
The “pollution” of the “alarming” of three microplastics per cubic meter of water “was observed throughout the subject, according to the results published in the Journal of Environmental Science and pollution investigation.
This is far from the registration of 40 microplastics per cubic meter in the 10 most contaminated rivers in the world: the Yellow River, Yangtze, Mekong, Ganges, Niger, Indo, Amur, Pearl and Hai, which irrigates is plastic.
But this does not take into account the volume of water that flows.
‘3,000 partners a second’
In the Rhone in Valence, France, the rapid flow means that there are “3,000 plastic games every second,” Ghiglione said. The Seine in Paris has around 900 per second.
“The mass of invisible microplastics to the naked eye is more significantly than that of the visible ones,” said Ghiglione, a result that “surprised” researchers. This was confirmed by the analytical advances that studies, which was in 2019.
“Large microplastics float and collect on the surface, while the invisibles are distributed through the water column and are established by many animals and organisms,” said Ghiglione, head of research in Ecobial Ecobial Ecobial of the Navy (CNRS).
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Samples were collected from the mouths of the Elbe, Ebro, Garon, Rhone, Rhine, Sena, Thames and Tiber rivers for about 40 chemicals, biologists and physicists of 19 research laboratories.
The Cathedral of Zaragoza next to the Ebro River in Zaragoza, in the Aragon region of Spain. Photo of Pierre-Philippe Marcou / AFP.
Then, the researchers made their way until they reached the first important city in each of the river roads.
“The microplastics are narrower than a grain of rice,” said Alexandra Ter Halle, chemistry of CNRs in Toulouse, which was in the analysis.
‘Tears of Sirena’
The partners have less than five millimeters of size, with the smallest invisible to the naked eye.
These include synthetic textile fibers when washing clothes and microplastics released from car tires or when they unscrew plastic bottle tapas.
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The researchers also found virgin plastic granules, the raw granules used to manufacture plastic products.
One of the studies identified a virulent bacterium in a microplastic in the Loira in France, capable of causing infections in humans.
Another unexpected finding was that a quarter of the microplastics discovered in the rivers do not derive from waste, but come from industrial plastic granules.
These granules, called “siren tears”, can also be found scattered on beaches after maritime incidents.
“What we see is that pollution is diffuse and established” and “comes from everywhere” in the rivers, he added.
“The international scientific coalition of which we are part (as part of the UN international negotiations to reduce plastic pollution) is asking for an important reduction in primary plastic production because we know that plastic production is directly linked to pollution,” he said.
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