The impact of microplastics on marine environment: A review

With increase in population, waste management is becoming a major issue, further recent studies also highlighted another serious issue of marine litter. It was observed that the human generated waste is accumulating in marine environment, with presence of high amounts of microplastics in water bodies such as rivers, lakes, seas and oceans. Research has highlighted that U.V light and low temperature helps in the breakdown of normal plastic into smaller pieces, which we generally referred as microplastics and through runoff, it enters into marine environment. Generally microplastics composed of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), polyethylene terephthalate (PET), polystyrene (PS) and nylon etc. With lack of efficient management, the concentration of these microplastics is increasing at an alarming rate, which not only affect the marine environment, but it is directly affecting the marine life. Some recent investigations have shown that marine environment closer to urban areas have higher levels of microplastics and aquatic animals of these areas have shown high accumulation of microplastics in their tissues. Further, it has also been reported that the other water pollutants, such as dyes, heavy metals and other chemicals can easily attach with microplastics and these microplastics also act as a carrier of other pollutants in the body of aquatic animals, which further enters into food chain. The present review provides an overview of the microplastics, its fate and its toxic effects to environment and marine health.