Microplastics -- tiny particles -- are posing a huge potential hazard to Marine ecosystems and human health.

Microplastics are not the instantly recognizable "white trash" we used to be familiar with, but they are almost everywhere in the vast ocean. Microplastics have been detected 4,500 meters down in the ocean, in the wilderness of Antarctica, and in seafood on the way to the dinner table.

The concept of microplastics was first proposed by British researchers in the journal Science in 2004. The current accepted definition of microplastics is: plastic fragments or particles less than 5 millimeters in diameter. This new Marine pollution is vividly called "PM2.5 in the ocean". It has attracted global attention in a short period of time, and has become one of the four major global environmental problems along with global climate change, ozone depletion and ocean acidification. It has been listed as the second major scientific problem in the field of environmental and ecological research by the United Nations.

Where did microplastics come from? How do we monitor and assess the level of contamination? What impact will it have on Marine ecology and People's Daily life? The research on these problems is still in its infancy. Not long ago, the Second Institute of Oceanology of the Ministry of Natural Resources in Hangzhou and the College of Oceanology of Zhejiang University jointly hosted the "2019 International Workshop on Marine Microplastics Monitoring and Management in the Asia-Pacific Region", which was attended by experts, scholars and representatives of government departments from 8 APEC economies. Generations of people who have received gifts from the ocean have joined hands to prevent Marine microplastic pollution and build a Marine ecological civilization.

Source: Probably from a tube of toothpaste

"Plastic particles, which can be as small as microns, are found in our everyday toothpaste, facial cleansers and cosmetics." "They are also used in fields such as medicine and industrial manufacturing," said Huang Wei, an associate researcher from Ocean Institute II, one of the organizers of the symposium. "These plastic particles that we produce directly as products or raw materials are nascent microplastics."

Secondary microplastics are produced by the fragmentation of large plastic products. Ships sailing at sea, nets for fishing, floating rafts for mariculture... The ubiquitous plastic products are gradually cracked into powder by natural forces such as ocean waves, ultraviolet light and living organisms. After enough time, the size can even be small to the nanometer scale.

So, in general, the source of microplastics is on land. It starts from your sink, your dresser, and goes down the drain, where it merges with its peers from all the pipes of modern life and production, and eventually flows into the sea. The University of Sydney's Coastal Urban Ecological Impact Research Centre, which monitors coastal areas in densely populated areas, found that household washing machines discharge more than 1,900 nylon fibres, known as microplastics, with each wash.

Microplastics have been found from coastal estuaries to the oceans, from the equator to the poles, and from the surface to the depths of the ocean. Eighty percent of samples of 'plankton-eating' fish such as red-tailed trevally and blue-tailed trevally collected off Easter Island in Chile contained between one and five pieces of microplastic in their stomachs, according to Chilean experts at the symposium. Water samples showed that there were nearly 60,000 pieces of microplastic per square kilometer of the sea.

In 2018, Huang Wei led a survey of microplastic pollution in sediments, seawater and aquatic products in Xiangshan Bay, Zhejiang province. Xiangshan Bay is a typical semi-enclosed bay with poor hydrodynamic conditions and self-cleaning capacity. It is surrounded by a large number of plastic product processing plants, dense population, and developed aquaculture and fishery. According to a recent survey report, microplastics have been detected in surface water and sediment in Xiangshan Bay. The average abundance of microplastics in sediments in this water area was slightly higher than that in the South Yellow Sea, but lower than that in the Bohai Sea, North Yellow Sea and Yangtze River Estuary. Aquaculture, terrigenous sewage and water exchange are important sources of microplastics in the ocean, according to the report.

Including Huang Wei's investigation, China has launched an all-out campaign to monitor microplastics in recent years. A large number of first-hand data have played an important role in understanding the distribution, drift path and destination of Marine microplastics in key global waters.

"Especially in the past, the east Asian seas and adjacent deficiency in the northwestern Pacific waters measured data, the scientific community to our country the waters surrounding the source of the micro plastic and drift path is not clear, so that the European and American countries because China is plastic production and consumption power, the plastic is a sea buckle in China first big hat, too. In fact, existing survey results show that the content of Marine microplastics in the offshore and surface waters of China is moderate to low." Huang Wei said that these detailed monitoring data, a strong response to the "plastic pollution theory in China."