Treatment characteristics of microplastics at biological sewage treatment facilities in Korea

Microplastics that are contained in household dust, personal care products, and other factors, are discharged into sewage treatment facilities (STF). While these microplastics are treated at the STF with a high treatment efficiency through settling, precipitation, filtering, and other treatments, co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Marine pollution bulletin 2018-12, Vol.137, p.1-8
Main Authors: Lee, Hyesung, Kim, Yongjin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anaerobic processes
Anoxia
Atmospheric particulates
Batch reactors
Consumer products
Discharge
Dust - analysis
Dust storms
Effluent
Effluents
Environmental Monitoring
Humans
Influent
Marine environment
Microplastics
Plastics
Plastics - chemistry
Republic of Korea
Seaweed - chemistry
Sewage
Sewage - chemistry
Sewage treatment
Sewage treatment facilities
Sewage treatment plants
Tire fragments
Waste treatment
Wastewater disposal
Wastewater treatment
Wastewater treatment plants
Water Pollutants, Chemical - chemistry
Water Pollution, Chemical - analysis
Water Purification - instrumentation
Water Purification - methods
Water treatment plants
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Summary:Microplastics that are contained in household dust, personal care products, and other factors, are discharged into sewage treatment facilities (STF). While these microplastics are treated at the STF with a high treatment efficiency through settling, precipitation, filtering, and other treatments, considering the large amount of effluent, large quantities of microplastics are still discharged into marine environments. In this study, biological STF using the anaerobic-anoxic-aerobic (A2O), sequence batch reactor (SBR), and the Media processes were investigated to confirm the efficiency of these treatments and the associated amounts of microplastics released for each process. The three investigated processes were found to have treatment efficiencies of about 98% or more. However, due to the large amount of effluent, more than four billion pieces of microplastic were released each year in each facility. Thus, even though biological STF show high treatment efficiencies, substantially large amounts of microplastics are still released into the marine environment. •Sewage treatment facilities are one of the sources of microplastics.•Each facility was found to have treatment efficiencies of about 98% or more.•More than three billion microplastics per year were released from the each facility.•The tire fragments seem to inflow through the combined sewerage.
ISSN:0025-326X
1879-3363
DOI:10.1016/j.marpolbul.2018.09.050