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3 Microplastic Contamination in the Marine Food Web: Its Impact on Human Health

       Richa Singh

       Institute of Environment and Sustainable Development, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

3.1 Introduction

Plastic or synthetic polymers are artificially made from petroleum products, and due to their versatile nature of being lightweight, strong, durable, transparent, and waterproof they are now part of everything we human beings use. Thus, they are widely distributed to the entire segment of human life, from waking up in the morning until going to bed at night; modern humans are surrounded by plastic. Plastics have proliferated into food packaging industries; stationary, electric, and electronic goods; vehicles, private and public transport; medical appliances; fishing nets and more. In today's era, one cannot imagine a day without plastic. Toothpastes, shaving creams, and soaps all have synthetic polymers in the form of microbeads (Sun et al. 2020). Plastics are highly resistant to microbial degradation as they are of artificial (human‐made) petroleum‐based products; therefore, their remediation by natural processes is difficult enough and takes a long time that can vary in the range of hundreds of years (Wierckx et al. 2018). Due to chemical (acid rain) and physical (temperature, pressure, moisture) processes, they degrade and break down into smaller fragments and, in smaller forms which do not degrade completely and pose negative impacts on the environment, these smaller forms have high potential to enter into the water or air matrices in invisible forms. MPs have a size ranging from 100 nm to 5 mm (Zhang et al. 2020). The microbeads and nanoparticles that are intentionally added into facewash, shaving creams, soaps, etc. are termed “primary” MPs; however, those which are added to the environment after the fragmentation of larger size plastic particles by impact of natural phenomenon, as well as anthropogenic activities in the environment, are considered “secondary” MPs (Lei et al. 2017). Due to poor waste management practices and lack of knowledge about proper disposal of such wastes among the consumers of such plastic‐based products, plastic debris is dumped directly into the ocean every year in huge quantities. Varying sizes of plastic particles, including larger and smaller beads of MPs, ultimately reach the water column of the ocean, and their presence is significantly reported in sediments (Harris 2020). They are found on the deep floor of the sea, in underground water tables, and in soils. Global plastic production has significantly boomed from 300 to 360 million metric tons in the last five years (Deccan Herald, 2020). As they are highly resistant to microbial degradation, they persist for a longer time in the ecosystem. MPs are a matter of great concern because of their high potential to make any organism unfit, as they have huge impacts on their metabolism.

      According to Boucher & Friot (2017), approximately 1.53 million tons/year of primary MPs enter the ocean via different pathways. These pathways include flushed water from our washroom's containing the MPs in microbead form from face scrubs, toothpaste, detergents, facewash, shampoo, cosmetic cream, etc., which goes into rivers through the drainage systems, and later become part of the ocean, as sewage treatment plants are not made for such efficiency in developing countries like India. MPs are extensively distributed throughout our ocean ecosystem; from zooplankton, bivalves, crustacean,