An assessment of microplastics threat to the marine environment: A short review in context of the Arabian/Persian Gulf
Graphical abstract
Section snippets
Introductory remarks
The dependency on plastics is noted to be increasing in various sectors. The main application, and by association representing the major demand sector of plastics resin, is packaging (Parker, 2018). This can easily be attributed to improvements of plastic packaging in reducing food wastage and bacterial contamination. Fig. 1 shows the global demand on plastic materials by sector where packaging, building/construction and institutional products represents the major share of the market by 45%,
Microplastics and surrounding environment
Microplastics have been defined as plastic particles of size range below 5 mm in size (Arthur et al., 2009). However, the term was initially used back in 2004 when it was used to describe microscopic plastic litter in marine environments (Thompson et al., 2004). These particle should not be confused with microlitter which has been defined previously by Gregory and Andrady (2003) as waste/debris particles that can pass through a 500 μm sieve and retained by a 67 μm sieve (0.06–0.5 mm in
Microplastics in context of Gulf
As mentioned earlier in the manuscript, there are limited studies conducted in the region to establish baseline information on microplastics abundance and types. Abbasi et al. (2018) surveyed five sites along Iran's coastline for the detection of microplastics and identifying their most abundant locations/presence. A total number of 828 microplastic particles that consisted mainly of fibrous fragments with a carbon and oxygen chains, in addition to metal elements. This is also consist with
Research efforts and main findings to date
Plastics will typically contain chemicals that will either stabilise their performance or aid in their degradation when exposed to the environment. These will typically contain a list of chemicals such diisoheptylphthalate, benzyl butyl phthalate, bis (2-ethylhexyl) phthalate, di-(2-ethylhexyl) adipate (DEHA), di-octyladipate, diethyl phthalates (DEP), butylated hydroxytoluene (BHT), 2- and 3-t-butyl-4 hydroxyanisole (BHA) and arsenic compounds (Hahladakis et al., 2018). POPs are naturally
Conclusions and future recommendations
Plastic solid waste (PSW) generation and accumulation in the environment has the potential to fragment into finer particles. These fine fractions are more challenging to sample, identify and manage. They have been suggested to have a negative effect on the marine ecosystem functioning by acting as vectors for contaminant transport into marine food chains. This communication covered the distribution of marine microplastics in the Gulf, with the emphasis to highlight the limitations and data gap
Author contribution statement
Sultan Majed Al-Salem: Conceptualisation, Original Draft Preparation and Analysis; Saif Uddin: Conceptualisation and Review; Faiza Al-Yamani: Review and Editing.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors of this communication declare that they have no known competing interests or personal relationships that could influence the work in any shape or form.
Acknowledgment
The authors are grateful to the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) for their support. We also would like to thank the blind reviewers for their feedback and comments which enriched this article immensely.
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