We dropped over 8,000 pieces of litter into a fake river to fight plastic pollution
Catherine Wilson receives funding from the EPSRC, the Environment Agency, Severn Rivers Trust and Shropshire Council. She is a member of the Welsh Government's Flood Coastal Erosion Committee.
Daniel Valero received funding from the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management (Rijkswaterstaat) under MoU scheme with IHE Delft.
Estimates of the amount of plastic entering the oceans from rivers range from 0.057 million to 2.75 million tonnes a year, or 10 to 250 bin lorry loads per day.
Plastic pollution can cause devastating effects to river ecosystems and the invertebrates, fish and mammals that live there. So improving these plastic estimates is vital.
This is why we’ve conducted research analysing how different pieces of litter behave in our waterways. We and our colleagues tracked the movement of more than 8,000 plastic items in large laboratory rivers, which can recreate the behaviour of real rivers under perfectly controlled conditions.
Consider the journey of a plastic coffee cup that has been carried by the wind or rain into a nearby river. Does the cup settle on the riverbed? Does it break up and fragment into tiny microplastic particles? Or does the cup bounce along the riverbed transported by the flow? Maybe the cup is suspended in the water column or floats on the surface where it can be transported large distances – even all the way to the ocean.
