Flourescent dye could highlight microplastics in oceans

28 Nov 2017

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Scientist have developed a novel technique to track plastic waste much of which measures as tiny a  20 micrometres, about the width of human hair, that ends up in the bottom of seas and oceans.

Millions of metric tons of plastic are washed into the sea each year, and according to studies, scientists have no idea where the vast majority of it goes. this is because plastic from bottles, packaging, etc, gets broken down into tiny fragments that are difficult to track. The new technique allows their whereabouts to be tracked using a glowing fluorescent dye.

A recent study estimated there is somewhere between 93,000 and 236,000 metric tons of the plasti waste floating around on the surface of the ocean, but this is only 1 per cent of the total plastic waste in the ocean.

Erik van Sebille, the lead author on that study said, "We don't know how much of it is on the seafloor, we don't know how much of it is on the coastlines or beaches, trapped in mangrove forests, those kinds of things, and we don't know how much is in the guts of marine animals and organisms.''

"As long as we don't know that, we don't know where marine life interacts with those plastics and we also don't know where is best to take out the plastic or to clean it up."

According to experts, the smallest microplastics in our oceans are potentially harmful.

Scientists at the University of Warwick in the UK found, according to the study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology, a much larger amount of small microplastics (smaller than one mm), than previously estimated - and significantly more than what would have been identified previously with traditional methods.

They also found that the greatest abundance of microplastics of this small size was polypropylene, a common polymer used in packaging and food containers.

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