Microplastics - let's all work to tackle these pollutants

Jo Bradley knows good SuDS. And she can’t help but wonder why we pass the buck when we can all do small things to prevent microplastics entering our environment

You don’t need me to tell you about the extent of plastic pollution today. Every newspaper, every media site and every radio podcast brings shocking new details about microplastics sneaking into our bodies in our food, from sewage sludge disposal to crops and atmospheric deposition of particles.

These particles pass deep into our tissues, causing unknown damage. Wildlife is affected as the particles leach toxins and as other organic compounds piggy-back on particles to reach further into marine environments, causing increasing harm. To be frank, it’s dystopian. And the more we look the worse it gets.

This is not all the fault of the water companies or the plastic manufacturers. We all play our part in this disaster and can be a part of the solution.

So let’s unpick the sources of these pollutants and consider how we can all make things better.

Where’s it all from?

A 2017 Eunomia report found that tyre-wear particles and microfibres from laundry are two major terrestrial sources of microplastics reaching our oceans. Another is fishing gear, whether cast or lost into the ocean.

Despite plastics’ supposed value, plastic pellets continue to wash up on seashores from spillages during transit. The photo above shows plastic shards spilled into the River Tawd.

At home, we carelessly flush plastics down the toilet; wet wipes, cotton-wool buds and sanitary products.

Disposable vapes, plastic food packaging and crisp packets blight our towns and cities, travelling from drains and gullies into streams, into rivers, into our seas. What can we do?

In fact, there are loads of things that you – yes, you – can do right now. First is to stop flushing plastic products down the toilet. Insist your family follows suit.

No one wants to make this change. Soiled sanitary products, wet wipes, nappy liners and cotton buds are smelly and grim. But while no one wants them in their bathroom bin, we cannot dump the problem on our oceans.

There are practical solutions. If members of your household prefer to use wet-wipes and plastic sanitary products, they should seal them in a bag before binning them. Provide the bags, as posh hotels do. Cotton buds can go in a bin with a lid. Nappy liners and nappies come with scented bags for easy disposal.

Providing ways for everyone to do the right thing is half the battle. Ask your family how they are getting along; can they suggest other solutions?

What about in the workplace? Plastic bottles, crisp wrappers and plastic food packaging are easy to deal with; bin them so they can’t escape into the wild. Make your colleagues’ lives easier with well-placed bins and apps to report when bins are full.

Microfibres from clothes are tricky to eliminate. One wash of modern family clothing creates an estimated 0.7 million microfibres. But there are ways to catch microfibres using filters on the washing-machine outlet that you empty from time to time, like the fluff-filter in a tumble drier.

And over time, these filters should become mandatory on all new washing machines. And if you favour natural fibres, at least the fibres in your wash water won’t be plastic.

Practical answers

Does this all sound like a faff? As summers get hotter, who wants bodily fluids lurking in their bins creating a health risk?

Far better to eliminate the plastic products altogether and to flush the bodily fluids into the sewers where they belong. Reusable sanitary products go in the laundry with everything else; so do nappy liners.

If members of your family use wet-wipes for personal toilet-care, talk to them gently about how to break the habit. It’s a tough conversation: it may take time to find an acceptable alternative. I can suggest three.

First – how very cosmopolitan – is to install a bidet. These are becoming more common but have the excitement of being novel. Second, consider pumping or spraying emollient cream onto folded toilet paper. Your family member may have a preferred lotion that makes this option more acceptable.

Finally, you can buy products tested and marked with the Fine to Flush logo. These items are far better than plastic wet-wipes. Be warned – this final option can be confusing and doesn’t break the wet-wipe habit. You’ll need to be clear that only Fine to Flush products go down the toilet.

Other products are much easier to eliminate.

Polystyrene food packaging and plastic forks are already being phased out. Fast-food chains are racing to develop biodegradable packaging and re-useable packaging. Soon, plastic pop bottles will have a small value, posted into deposit-return machines so that fewer end up bobbing about in our rivers.

A word of caution here. People often have very good reasons to use plastic products, in the bathroom and elsewhere. Policymakers must avoid making life more difficult for those who really need these things. New solutions must fit everyone. They must not force anyone into an uncomfortable or impossible position.

The biggest source of microplastics in our rivers and oceans is microplastic tyre-wear particles. Your tyres shed them as you trundle along the road. They drift into the atmosphere and wend their way around the world, settling in the environment. And they settle on the road surface, whooshed into the drainage system and down to the river whenever it rains.

Tyre-wear particles are black and oddly shaped. They leach toxins as they drift down the rivers, carrying tiny, toxic poly-aromatic hydrocarbons that are carcinogenic and bio-accumulative.

What can we do? One option is excellent road-sweeping practices. We should sweep our roads often when we anticipate rain. That’s not something the UK does widely, being publicly funded and resource-intensive.

And so to SuDS

One answer to this – you guessed it! – is good SuDS.

Our trunk roads and motorways are so heavily polluted that we must pre-treat the runoff before we introduce it to vegetation-based SuDS. We can capture most particles using vortex grit separators, oil/water separators, stormwater filters and other technologies. Easy-to-maintain devices that capture pollutants allow safe disposal of microplastics.

The next step is downstream nature-based solutions, such as ponds, bioswales and basins. Runoff from residential roads and less polluted surfaces can go straight into bioswales, bioremediation zones, tree-pits and other SuDS devices that capture microplastics at surface and in soil layers.

There are concerns about how microplastics in the soils of SuDS affect the ecosystem. Frankly, this needs a lot more research. But while we look into it, our priority must be to design and deliver the best SuDS we can.

And we must also – all of us – work together at home and at work to keep plastic out of our sewers, our stormwater drains, our rivers and our oceans.

Jo Bradley MCIWEM C.WEM is director of UK operations at Stormwater Shepherds. She writes a regular SuDS and The City column, exclusive to The Environment magazine at CIWEM. This article was first published in May 2023