AS MILLIONS of tonnes a year of microplastic waste mounts in marine environments, Flinders University scientists warn the ramifications to wildlife, food webs and human health are still little understood.
An Environmental Pollution review of how plastic waste and its associated chemicals impact marine food webs warns the impact of this "omnipresent contamination" of marine environments is "not well understood".
It can take hundreds of years for plastics to degrade, with synthetic by-products breaking into ever smaller particles through the hydrolysis of hydrocarbons by microbes and exposure to environmental conditions.
These plastics of various sizes pose a substantial risk to life forms right down the food web, says Flinders University College of Science and Engineering PhD candidate Elise Tuuri, from the Plankton and Marine Microbiology Lab at Flinders.
"This study highlights the complexity of microplastics as a pollutant and how this can lead to difficulties in determining accurate impacts on human health and local marine environments.
"There is a direct impact of plastic pollution on bacterial growth, protein production, the acquisition mechanisms of phosphorous, N2-fixation rates, genome-wide transcriptional changes, and photosynthesis," said Tuuri.
"So we need to understand what chemical additives do in the sea to macrophytes, phytoplankton, zooplankton, and microbes."
The researchers are calling for more research into plastic contamination and synthetic additives to understand and prevent further potential environmental and biological health problems.
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