Plastic waste fragments, fibres from clothes washing and packaging residues. Plastics and microplastics have invaded lakes and reservoirs on a global scale. Pollution caused by this debris affects even the most remote places, where human impact is minimal. Moreover, for the first time it appears that in some cases concentrations of plastic found in freshwater environments are higher than those found in plastic islands in the ocean, so-called ‘Garbage patches’.
Light has been shed on the factors that cause this contamination by the study led by young researcher Veronica Nava, a research fellow at the University of Milan-Bicocca’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, under the supervision of Professor Barbara Leoni, coordinator of the Inland Water Ecology and Management research group, which deals with lakes and rivers in the same department. The research was published in the scientific journal Nature under the title ‘Plastic debris in lakes and reservoirs’.
The project involved 79 researchers belonging to the international Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON), which is active in scientific research on a global scale on processes and phenomena occurring in freshwater environments. Thanks to this group of scientists, it was possible to take surface water samples, using plankton nets, from 38 lakes located in 23 different countries, spread across 6 continents, representing different environmental conditions.