Microplastics are recognized as a factor of global change contaminating many environmental compartments. Agricultural soils are very likely to receive microplastic contamination and are of particular concern due to their role in food production. Microplastic fibers have already been shown to be able to affect soil properties, but their effect on different soil types is poorly understood. Moreover, limited information is available on how the presence of this pollutant can affect soil water erosion processes, which are extremely important issues in many environments. In the light of this, we performed two experiments (carried out on a microscale) to investigate how the presence of polyester microplastic fibers affects soil physical and hydrological parameters and processes such as aggregate formation and soil erosion in three different agricultural soil types (a Vertisol, an Entisol, and an Alfisol).Our data show that the effects of polyester microplastic fibers on soil physical parameters and erosion are strongly dependent on soil type. We found that microplastic fiber contamination can affect soil bulk density, capacitive indicators of soil physical quality, and decrease the formation of new aggregates (labile in the incubation period applied in our experiments) but did not affect their stability in water. However, we found that polyester microplastic fibers reduced soil loss and sediment concentration, especially in the most erodible soils. In this paper, we provide some hypotheses, but certainly future data are still needed to confirm or disprove our hypotheses.Overall, our results highlight the importance of broadly exploring soil properties, such as texture, mineralogy, organic carbon content, etc., to better understand how the various soil types respond to microplastic fiber contamination.

中文翻译：

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聚酯微塑料纤维根据土壤类型影响土壤物理性质和侵蚀

微塑料被认为是污染许多环境隔间的全球变化的一个因素。农业土壤很可能受到微塑料污染，并且由于它们在食品生产中的作用而受到特别关注。微塑料纤维已被证明能够影响土壤性质，但人们对它们对不同土壤类型的影响知之甚少。此外，关于这种污染物的存在如何影响土壤水侵蚀过程的信息有限，这在许多环境中都是极其重要的问题。有鉴于此，我们进行了两项实验（在微观尺度上进行）来研究聚酯微塑料纤维的存在如何影响土壤物理和水文参数以及三种不同农业土壤类型（Vertisol、Entisol 和Alfisol)。我们的数据表明，聚酯微塑料纤维对土壤物理参数和侵蚀的影响在很大程度上取决于土壤类型。我们发现微塑料纤维污染会影响土壤容重、土壤物理质量的电容指标，并减少新聚集体的形成（在我们的实验中应用的潜伏期不稳定），但不会影响它们在水中的稳定性。然而，我们发现聚酯微塑料纤维减少了土壤流失和沉积物浓度，特别是在最易侵蚀的土壤中。在本文中，我们提供了一些假设，但肯定仍需要未来的数据来证实或反驳我们的假设。总体而言，我们的结果强调了广泛探索土壤特性（如质地、矿物学、有机碳含量等）的重要性，以更好地了解各种土壤类型对微塑料纤维污染的反应。