Читать книгу Plastic and Microplastic in the Environment - Группа авторов - Страница 34

Over the last 50 years, plastic has revolutionized the way we live and is now an essential part of our lives. Globally, plastic wastes have increased at a staggering rate in the last few decades, and around 79% are disposed of in landfills or in the surrounding environment with no proper waste management (Geyer et al. 2017). Out of this, a staggering amount of plastic waste, approximately 4.8–12.7 million tons, is estimated to enter the oceans each year, a large quantity of which comes from land‐based sources and is transported by fluvial or aeolian processes (Jambeck et al. 2015). Rivers are one of the main contributors of plastic waste to the oceans, and are reported to carry 2 million tons of MPs annually (Lebreton et al. 2017). It has been investigated and found that this river‐transported plastic makes up 80% of the plastic debris released from the terrestrial environment to the oceans (Horton et al. 2017; Law & Thompson 2014). With this growing awareness of the importance of the riverine source of plastic wastes in the marine environment in recent years, several studies have been carried out in various world rivers. These include the Los Angeles River (Moore et al. 2005), Danube (Lechner et al. 2014), Yangtze Estuary (Zhao et al. 2014), Rhine (Mani et al. 2015), Selenga River (Battulga et al. 2019), Beijiang River (Tan et al. 2019), Ciwalengke River (Alam et al. 2019), and others. This chapter discusses the various works done with freshwater MPs across the globe, with a special focus on studies in India.