Microplastics from industrial sources: A known but overlooked problem

Date

2025-04-01

Author

Karakurt, Ozan
Altuntaş, Oğuzhan
Şimşek, İrem
Hatinoğlu, Dilara
Sanin, Faika Dilek

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Current studies suggest that industrial wastewaters can be major sources of microplastics (MPs), but specific studies are rare in regard to specific industries and organized industrial zones (OIZs). This study addresses this gap by analyzing two different OIZs and two selected industries from each in terms of their MPs concentrations, characteristics, their diurnal variation and the effect of pretreatments employed by the industries. One OIZ contains an industrial WWTP (IWWTP) so the effect of this plant by the analysis of wastewater from inlet, outlet as well as wastewater and sludge from specific units are evaluated. MPs encountered had a variety of sizes, but the smallest size (38 μm to 425 μm) dominated almost all the samples analyzed. Variety of plastics have been observed including the most common types as well as rare ones. MPs' relative abundances changed and diversity decreased after treatment. It is shown that IWWTPs can reduce MP concentrations up to 95 %, and results in the capture of 127 million particles each day. However, the results also show that industrial wastewaters can still emit 7.6 million particles, which indicates both the magnitude of the problem and the effectiveness of WWTPs, considering that the other OIZ without a WWTP discharges 384 million MPs daily.

Subject Keywords

Industrial wastewaters, Microplastics, Organized industrial zones, Wastewater treatment plant

URI

https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=105000247657&origin=inward
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/114278

Collections

Department of Environmental Engineering, Article