Comment October 4, 2024
By Pauline Gerrard, Executive Director
As the world gathered for World Water Week in Stockholm, it seems as though no one could escape news of the ubiquity of microplastics in our fresh water.
This time they had been discovered in freshwater fish fillets—that is to say, the part of the fish that we primarily eat—by researchers in Toronto.
They found an average of 123 microplastics per serving of fish, which is over twelve times as many particles as the 9 microplastics ingested per serving of grocery store Alaska Pollock found in a study by the same authors published earlier this year.
It’s a worrying finding, to say the least, and matters because not only did we learn that microplastics are getting deeper into the bodies of fish (and, therefore, likely those of other freshwater dwellers as well), but because these are the parts of fish that are ingested by humans. This almost certainly means more microplastics entering our bodies.
And it doesn’t come as a surprise, given that overall quilt of evidence of the omnipresence of plastics in our environment—blown across the Sahara Desert and the Galapagos islands—has been building for years.
So, that’s the bad news.
Where do we go from here? How can we undo some of the damage that has already been wrought, and reduce the impact of what is yet to come?
First, as dejecting a process as it might be, we really do need to learn more about where plastics are found in the environment, and where they come from. This means more funds from government coffers for researchers to go out into nature and discover the trajectory of microplastics—from source to monitoring spots.
We also need to understand the fate of plastics in our environment. So, if microplastics are being leached into a lake through the air—which does happen, by the way—adding to the research that is already been undertaken means we will better understand how plastics move within our world.
A better grasp on the microplastics landscape needs to inform (and be coupled with) ongoing strategies to limit how much plastic ends up in the environment. This means we need to look at manufacturing methods. Single-use plastic bans at state, country and federal levels across the globe are heartening to see—but we need more, and fast.
And good, old-fashioned getting our hands dirty with the great general public is also a massive part of this complex puzzle.
This can mean many things. Rolling up our sleeves and organizing clean-ups that empower citizens to clean up their own backyard. Public-awareness campaigns that encourage everyday folks to voluntarily forgo single-use plastics for the greater good. Maybe even going one step further and asking them to take up the mantle as citizen scientists and collect data on plastic pollution in their local environment.
Everyone has a part to play in this pressing environmental issue that affects, well, everyone. So as another World Water Week in Sweden passes us by this year, let’s not forget the role that we all have to play—from governments to individual citizens—to keep plastics out of our lakes and rivers.
Republished with permission from The Hill Times