Tarun Kundu, Kesoram Rayon, Nayasarai, Hooghly, West Bengal

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   Those shreds of thermocol that go down the trash aren't that bad, are they? Turns out that these very crumbs of plastics - microplatiscs have infiltrated much deeper into our lives than we could have ever imagined. Rolling down from the mid-eighteenth century to the modern $lsquo;digital$rsquo; age, civilization has seen numerous technological innovations made by man. The start of the Industrial Revolution in Europe marks a major turning point in World history. Power driven mass production plants and machinery in the fields of iron & steel, textiles, chemicals opened a new era of affluence in goods and products. All power started being sourced from the burning of fossil fuels. The planet rapidly fell into the curse of pollution. Global warming took birth and transformed into the crisis that it has become now. But that is not all. As evident, fossil fuels weren't just used for fuels. One of the major products of such petroleum fuels was plastic. The planet is now facing the devastation caused by the disposal and piling up of post used polymeric goods, especially short-lived packaging material. The extent of this devastation makes Global Warming itself seem like a polite threat.
  The term ‘Microplastic’ was first coined by Thompson in the year 2004. It has been listed as the second most important scientific issue in the field of environment and ecology. Microplastics are small plastic pieces less than five millimeters in length. Many of them come from larger plastic articles, most of which are thrown away after being used. Natural weathering effects and photo-degradation break these into smaller fragments.
- Microbeads are the other potential sources of Microplastics. These are very tiny pieces of manufactured polyethylene plastics that are added as exfoliants to health and beauty products like shampoo, cleansers, and toothpaste. These notoriously tiny pieces can pass through water filters which leaves hardly any mechanism to arrest them from draining down to water bodies like oceans, lakes, rivers and soil. This has the following propagative effects on ecology.
- Microplastics in the form of fibers, fragments, pellets are widespread in oceans and natural sediments.
- Microplastics interact with POPs and contaminate marine biota when ingested.
- Marine food webs are affected by bio-magnification. Microplaics consumed by small organisms accumulate in larger animals who prey on them in much larger quantities. This makes them even harder to extract from the envnment. Chronic biological effects in marine organisms are the result of accumulation of microplastics in their tissues.
  Many organisms confuse microplastics as food and feed on them in place of right food articles. Their stomach gets filled up with plastic debris and this restricts optimal food intake and then jeopardizes the life mechanism of the micro-organisms and as a result, whole ecology of that particular ecosystem. Smaller aquatic animals are already highly affected but we as common people, get to know about this only when the death of a whale breaks the news.
  The most frequent microplastics range from 0.1 to 2 mm, however, transparent fibers are more prominent in this range. Polyester, the mostly used fiber for clothing is most common type of microplastic in marine debris as well as beach sediments. Besides, polyvinyl acetate and polyvinyl chloride are used as engineering plastics; polyethylene and polypropylene used in packaging material are abundant in marine bed and coastal parts around the world. Ingestion of microplastics can cause alteration in chromosomes in humans, which leads to infertility, obesity and other critical health hazards.
  Microbeads are not a recent issue. They came into use in personal care products around fifty years back but awareness came only in recent years with growing social and environmental movements against plastic pollution. Since 1950, global plastic production has increased from 1.5 to 311 million tons per annum till 2014. Due to increasing production of synthetic polymers and their low biodegradability, plastic pollution has become a serious environmental problem. It has been estimated that every year 4.8 to 12.7 million tons of plastic debris enters into the marine environment and this will increase manifold by the year 2025.
  Soil pollution by microplastics is another matter of increasing concern. The main sources of microplastics in soil include mulching film, sludge, wastewater irrigation and atmospheric deposition. Besides this, there is the huge carryover of microplastics from road runoffs, urban debris, and vehicle tyres. With increasing usage and uncontrolled disposal of plastic, treatment practices like lime stabilization, anaerobic digestion or thermal drying are not sufficient to remove microplastics. Since plastic is non biodegradable, it accumulates within the soil in an unnoticed way for a long time. The case is worse when untreated waste water from urban effluents is directly used in irrigation. Huge amount of plastic debris is carried away to the fields both in micro and macro form.
  Once microplastics are accumulated in soil, the topsoil provides a environment for degradation in presence of UV light, excess oxygen availability, agricultural tilling, microbial and other terrestrial organisms activities on plastic. All these effects turn plastic debris into microplastics. There are a number of mechanisms by which microplastics from topsoil percolate to deeper soil - agricultural tillage, leaching , heavy rains, floods , bioprocess , micro-organisms and transportation by small animals like earthworms. The serious ill effects include - contamination of ground water, loss of soil integrity in form of severe soil erosion and of course soil fertility. Additionally, illegal dumping of waste near roads and tire abrasion can also contribute to microplastic occurrences in the soil. For tire abrasion, a report showed that the annual emission of rubber dust may go upto the level of 110,000 MT in country like Germany.
  The highest concern with this sort of pollution lies in its irreversibility. Several ways and means are emerging to control this devastation. The direct way is limiting plastic production. Debris has to be prevented from draining down to water streams and thus ending up at sea. The other ways being adopted to combat plastic pollution are mainly ECO labelling, recycling and introducing alternatives to plastic. Eco-labelling identifies the environmental interaction of the product in its life cycle especially at end of its useful life or till its intended purpose is fulfilled. Labeling like ‘ECO-friendly’, ‘biodegradable’, ‘compostable’, ‘recyclable’ etc. helps in growing environmental awareness in people.
  Recycling of plastic requires its own management. Plastic products bear a Plastic identification Code (PIC) - a short nomenclature which helps the re-processor in identifying and segregating similar type of plastic for reprocessing. Governing bodies in different parts of the world have imposed regulatory laws in view of arresting plastic pollution. The Government of India has also put forward the Plastic Rules 2016 with an exhaustive regulation against plastic pollution.
  The sustainable action against plastic pollution is to find an ECO-friendly substitute. Lots of products of natural origin like paper, bamboo, wood with low lifecycle and various others are taking place of plastics. Cellulose film and polylactic acid (PLA) film, the known industrial product may play a major role in acting as a sustainable substitute of plastic thin film packaging which now is the cause of an uncontrollable plastic nuisance and source of microplastic hazards to our environment. Above all, a widespread awareness percolated down to all levels of people in all spheres of our life around the globe may rescue us from the danger of irrecoverable plastic pollution.

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