Page - (000009) - in Freshwater Microplastics - Emerging Environmental Contaminants?

Preface FreshwaterMicroplastics asEmergingContaminants: MuchProgress,ManyQuestions Historically – if one can say that given the infancy of the field – environmental plastic debris has been the baby ofmarine research.Driven by the rediscovery of long forgotten, 1970s studies on the occurrence of small plastic fragments (today termed microplastics) in the oceans, oceanographers and marine biologists resurrected the topic in the early 2000s. Since then, thefieldhas rapidly expanded andestablished thatplasticsareubiquitous in themarinesystem, fromtheArctic to Antarctic and from the surface to the deep sea. Whileobviously thesourcesofenvironmentalplasticsare land-based,muchless research has been dedicated to investigating them in freshwater systems. At the time ofwriting this book, less than four percent of publications had a freshwater context, reflecting the idea that streams, rivers, and lakes aremere transport routes transferringplastics to theoceans similar toa sewer.Because this is too simplistic, this book is dedicated to the in-between. Our authors explore the state of the science, including themajor advances and challenges, with regard to the sources, fate, abundance, and impacts ofmicroplastics on freshwater ecosystems. Despite themanygaps in our knowledge,wehighlight thatmicroplastics are pollutants of emerging concern independent of the salinity of the surroundingmedium. Environmental (micro)plastics arewhat somecall awicked problem, i.e., there is considerable complexity involved when one tries to understand the impact of these syntheticmaterials on thenaturalworld. Just as anexample, there is no such thing as “the microplastic.” Currently, there are in commerce more than 5,300 grades of synthetic polymers.1 Their heterogeneous physico-chemical properties will likely result in very heterogeneous fates and effects once they enter the 1According to the plastics industry’s information systemCAMPUS (http://www.campusplastics. com, last visited on June20, 2017). xi