Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Lee, Hyesung
• Kim, Yongjin

Titel

Treatment characteristics of microplastics at biological sewage treatment facilities in Korea

Ist Teil von

• Marine pollution bulletin, 2018-12, Vol.137, p.1-8

Ort / Verlag

England: Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2018

Quelle

MEDLINE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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.