Investigation of the Urban Factors Affecting Microplastic Pollution in Chinese Cities: The Case of Ningbo

Microplastic pollution in Chinese urban rivers: The influence of urban factors

“…The Qiantang River flows through Hangzhou City, Zhejiang, which is the neighboring 22 catchment to Ningbo with broadly similar geographical conditions. It is therefore noteworthy that the characteristics of microplastic pollution (including shape, size and color distributions) in the Qiantang River were similar to those in Fenghua River (Xu et al, 2020a;. Microplastic concentrations were lower in the Fenghua River than those recorded in the Pearl River Basin and Yangtze River Estuary (Fig.…”

“…Among them, the development of Fenghua district (population: 0.2-0.5 million) and Yuyao district (population: 0.5-1 million) is closely related to the major urban rivers of the Ningbo City district (NDRC, 2020;Xu et al, 2020a). To consider the influence of urban factors (especially land-use types, population density and GDP) on microplastic concentrations, a spatially dense sampling network was deployed on the urban section of Fenghua River.…”

“…6) (Lin et al, 2018;Xu et al, 2020b;Yan et al, 2019), indicative of domestic sewage, waste fabrics, and fishery activities (Xu et al, 2019;Xue et al, 2020). Numerous clothing/garment factories in Ningbo may be an important source of detected microplastic fiber pollution (Tang et al, 2015;Xu et al, 2020a). It is also worth noting that during the visual identification of microplastics in this study, the amounts of natural fibers (including cotton and wool) was much higher than that of synthetic fibers, supporting recent recognition of the prevalence of these non-plastic anthropogenic particles in freshwater (Stanton et al, 2019), marine (Suaria et al, 2020) and biota (Guen et al, 2019) microplastic surveys.…”

“…Cities provide multiple sources of microplastics in spatially concentrated areas (Xu et al, 2020a), which are readily transported to other ecosystems, particularly by rivers (Xu et al, 2020b). However, studies on microplastic abundances in urban river catchments remains limited, especially relative to the marine environment (Xu et al, 2020a(Xu et al, , 2020bZhang et al, 2018), yet critically important in understanding the processes and characteristics of microplastics entering aquatic environments.…”

“…Cities provide multiple sources of microplastics in spatially concentrated areas (Xu et al, 2020a), which are readily transported to other ecosystems, particularly by rivers (Xu et al, 2020b). However, studies on microplastic abundances in urban river catchments remains limited, especially relative to the marine environment (Xu et al, 2020a(Xu et al, , 2020bZhang et al, 2018), yet critically important in understanding the processes and characteristics of microplastics entering aquatic environments. Thus, this manuscript investigates microplastic pollution in the Fenghua River, which flows through the Chinese coastal megacity Ningbo, in order to quantify concentrations, morphologies and material properties of microplastic pollution, and to relate these variables to surrounding urban land use.…”