Micro- and nano-plastics in marine environment: Source, distribution and threats - A review

Abstract

Plastic litters have become the predominant components of marine debris due to extensive consumption plastics and mismanagement of plastic wastes. As part of the problem, microplastics (MPs) and nanoplastics (NPs) have generated special concerns due to their unique features that make them easy to transfer among oceans in the marine ecosystem, across different trophic levels inside the food web, and even across different tissues inside contaminated animals. Studies have demonstrated the almost omnipresence of MPs in the marine ecosystem, which present serious threats to the health of marine animals, causing symptoms such as malnutrition, inflammation, chemical poisoning, growth thwarting, decrease of fecundity, and death due to damages at individual, organ, tissue, cell, and molecule levels. The information on NPs in the marine ecosystem has been scarce due to the challenges in sampling and detecting these nano-scaled entities. In vitro and in vivo experiments have demonstrated that NPs have the potential to penetrate different biological barriers including the gastrointestinal barrier and the brain blood barrier and have been detected in many important organs such as brains, the circulation system and livers of sampled animals.

Keywords: Food web; Health; Marine environment; Microplastics; Nanoplastics; Pollution.