Assessment of Microplastic Pollution along the Bhairab River, Jashore Municipality, Bangladesh

Abstract

Plastic waste problem has become a burning issue at present in many countries and its solution to environment friendly manner has become an urgent need for attaining the sustainable development goals. Bhairab River belongs to the south-western part of Bangladesh consisting of a distributary of the Ganges. The study was conducted surrounding Bhairab River under Jashore Municipality where soil and water samples were collected besides the highly plastic contaminated Bhairab River. Plastic contaminated five rural and five urban points with two control samples were used for the study. Among these plastic categories, micropelletesin the mid rang size fractions (0.25-0.7mm) were the predominant types of plastics noticed in the specified sampling site clearly. Most of the samples, dark colored pellets were found here suspected that suspended pellets seemed to be the polyethylene based micro plastics. However, SEM-EDX analysis performed here showed that suspended pellets were primarily metallic. Fibres were the second most common types of micro plastics identified visually with different colors such as black, dark blue, red etc. Microfibers with similar characteristics were found in freshwater ecosystem with <2mm identified visually. In FTIR analysis, in most of the water sample, strong halo compounds were found together with N-H stretching with primary amine was found. Apart from the soil samples, most of the samples showed similar transmittance compared with the control samples but rest of the samples, aliphatic amine, conjugated alkene and primary amine were found. In SEM analysis, urban soil samples showed structural deformation because more plastic fragments were responsible for deformation of soil samples but in rural samples, structural deformation were not found here compared with the soil samples. In EDX analysis, compare with the control samples, in most of the urban soil samples, carbon was present at the highest rate than the rural soil samples. Whereas, chromium, cobalt, lead were found at the highest rate in most of the urban soil samples. At the end, it can be concluded that recycling would be the only sustainable options to reduce this huge plastic pollution therefore more research regarding the plastic waste management is dying need. Keywords: Plastic Pollution, Plastics packaging (Low Density Polyethylene), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, Scanning Electron Microscope, Energy Dispersive X-Ray, Microscopic analysis.