The abundance and characteristics of microplastics in surface water in the transboundary Ganges River

Baseline Study on Microplastics in Indian Rivers under Different Anthropogenic Influences

“…Table 3 compares the concentrations from the present study with that detected from earlier MP concentrations in different aquatic environments in India. Several studies, including the present study, found predominantly fibres, ranging from 37.9% [50], over 51.6% [15] and 64% (this study) up to 91% [12]. In this context, the difficulty of visually identifying fibres as MP must be pointed out.…”

“…Concerning microplastic in Indian rivers. Napper et al [12] detected an average MP contamination of 0.038 particles/L, with 91% of those particles being fibres from the samples from the surface water of the Ganges River in Northern India and Bangladesh. However, this concentration is much lower than the detected MP concentrations from the present study.…”

“…That accumulates to an annual discharge of 11.6 trillion (10 12 ) MP particles. To compare the daily MP load of the Adyar River, Napper et al [12] estimated a lower daily input of 1-3 billion MP particles by the Ganges River into the Bay of Bengal. However, there is no continuous flow in the Adyar River over the year, leading to the assumption that a huge amount of MP is stored within the river sediments during minimum flow rates.…”

“…According to Lebreton et al [11], the second most polluted river of the world is claimed to be the Ganges (India), which discharges up to 1.05 × 10 5 tons of plastic annually into the Indian Ocean. Napper et al [12] took samples along the Ganges River and reported that the Ganges could release up to 1-3 billion MPs into the Indian Ocean on a daily basis. India, which inhabits currently 1.35 billion people, is the second most populated country in the world, and has insufficient waste management and wastewater treatment [13], leading to a high MP generation.…”

“…For this reason, studies on the heavy metal contents in Indian rivers have been increasingly carried out in recent years [13]. However, there are hardly any studies on environmental MP concentrations in Indian watercourses to date [12,15], since the focus was on MP in marine environments [16][17][18][19][20]. It can be assumed that, on the one hand, the effluents discharged contain MP and that, on the other hand, solid waste degrades to MP once introduced into the environment and thus enters freshwater systems, too.…”