Building Alliances - Microplastics, Waste and Landfill Research (15/10/24)

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Our lead researcher, Evie, has tasked us to research how microplastics effect the environments we are going to be designing. I was tasked with researching of microplastics in human waste, over usage  of microplastics and how they effect Junkyards and Land fills.

To start of my research, I thought it would be beneficial for me and my team to investigate what exactly are microplastics and where do they come from.

What are microplastics and where do they come from?

Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastic material typically smaller than five millimetres. They can be divided into two main categories:

Primary Microplastics

  • Directly released into the environment as small particles
  • Are estimated to represent 12 - 31% of microplastics in the oceans
  • Main sources are laundering of synthetic clothes (35%), abrasion of tyres through driving (28%), intentionally added microplastics in personal care products such as microbeads in facial scrubs (2%)
Secondary Microplastics
  • Originate from degradation of larger plastic objects, such as plastic bags, bottles or fishing nets
  • Accounts for 69 - 81% of microplastics in the ocean

What are Landfills and how they effect the environment

Land fills are places where waste is disposed of when it can't be recycled or composted. They're designed to protect the environment and human health by keeping waste separate from the surrounding soil, groundwater and air. This however, doesn't stop it from being harmful. Landfills produce terrible gases from the decaying organic waster creating a lot of decomposition gases, the most prominent, being CO2. This obviously is a pretty big contribution to global warming.

Microplastics in Landfills

Landfills produce a liquid known as leachate which seeps through the waste extracting and dissolving the waste. This can lead to contaminating groundwater, surface water and soil which poses a threat to human health as the environment as we may unintentionally ingest the toxic waste through the water.

Plastic waste that are dumped in landfills go through several abrasive activities which produce secondary microplastics. Microplastics can also enter these land fills from primary sources. Microplastics get trapped in fat, oil, grease and solid sludge when the leachate gets treated in wastewater treatment plants. 

This diagram from an article on microplastics in landfill leachate demonstrates this process.

Leachate Treatment Process (Elsevier, 2023)

 For plastic products, the best solution possible is to recycle them. Only 15 - 20% of all plastic waste can be recycled and approximately 21 - 42% is deposited in landfills. The same article has some data regarding the amount of microplastics found in samples taken from landfill leachate.

MPs in Landfill Leachate (Elsevier, 2023)


Solutions
Steps taken by organisations/ government
  • Supermarkets are charging for single use carrier bags
  • In 2018, the English and Scottish governments banned sale and production of microbeads in personal care products
  • In 2020, the English government banned the sale of plastic straws, stirrers and cotton buds
  • Companies will be required to cover the cost of recycling and disposing of their packaging

Steps that can be taken by the individual
  • Avoid cosmetic products containing plastic beads. 
  • Avoid single use plastics 
  • Avoid buying synthetic clothing
  • Air dry synthetic clothing to reduce shedding of the plastics
  • Dispose of plastic items correctly through recycling
How am I going to use this research in my project?

I did some basic research of microplastics as our prompt focusses on the effects of microplastics on the food chain. In order for me to be able to accurately capture what the prompt is asking, I first need to make sure I understand what microplastics are and how they impact our health. 

I did some more specific research on microplastics in landfill purely because I am designing a junkyard for my environment and to be able to adhere to the prompt I felt it would be useful to find how microplastics affect our waste. This led me to discovering that rain and waste come together to make leachate which is filled full of microplastics as shown in the table above. It was also brought to my attention that it's almost impossible to fully get rid of microplastics from leachate. I hope to find to a way to include my research on leachate by turning it into a boss mechanic.

Reference list:

Admin, 2023. Microplastics: Small Thing, Big Problem [online]. Froglife. Available at: https://www.froglife.org/2023/06/27/microplastics-small-thing-big-problem/ [Accessed 15 October 2024].

Elsevier, 2023. Microplastics in landfill leachate: Sources, detection, occurrence, and removal [online]. National Library of Medicine. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10024173/#sec2title [Accessed 15 October 2024].

European Parliament, 2018. Microplastics: sources, effects and solutions [online]. European Parliament. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20181116STO19217/microplastics-sources-effects-and-solutions [Accessed 15 October 2024].

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