i-plastic project, led by our ICTA-UAB researcher Patrizia Ziveri, was one of the six projects from the Joint Action Ecological Aspects of Microplastics that held their joint midterm meeting on 27-28 April 2022, in Bruxelles.

The objectives of the meeting were to present and discuss the results of the projects and their impacts, address common issues and challenges, and look ahead on the second half of the projects.

The six selected microplastics projects, funded by the intergovernmental platform JPI Oceans, include 71 partners from 16 countries, and conduct research on sources of microplastics, methods for identifying smaller micro- and (nano-) plastics and the monitoring of circulation of microplastics in marine systems and their effects thereon.

Patrizia Ziveri chaired the session on the “Identification, characterisation and quantification of the major microplastic sources”, in which ICTA-UAB researcher Michael Grelaud gave the presentation “Dispersion of micro-plastics in tropical and temperate estuary systems”. Following this, ICTA-UAB predoctoral researcher Laura Simon-Sánchez talked about the “Fate in Marine Sedimentary Records of the Ebro Prodelta (NW Mediterranean). On Thursday April 28th, Patrizia Ziveri was part of the final panel discussion on the 2nd phase of project lifetime and alignment and collaboration between the projects.

The recent acceleration of microplastics pollution has increased the need to develop novel collaborative tools for synergistic problems affecting coastal and oceanic ecosystems. One of the main hurdles is the lack of standardized, comparable and integrated information on smaller size (micro- and nano-) plastics pollution, including their abundance, sources, regional hotspots of accumulation, fragmentation, and transport at the land-sea interface.

The scientific products of the i-plastic project will provide key knowledge concerning one of the main pathways of plastics to the ocean, their fate at the land-sea interface to the open ocean, and the effects of smaller plastics on the ecosystems of different areas worldwide, by making projections to understand the impacts and dispersion of microplastics and nanoplastics in the next decades of the Anthropocene.

Coordinated by Patrizia Ziveri, the i-plastic project assembles a multidisciplinary consortium of European and Brazilian experts from five institutes and four countries. Together they assess the dispersion and impacts of microplastics and nanoplastics in the tropical and temperate oceans by quantifying the seasonal transport and dispersion in three selected estuaries (hotspots of plastic sources) and adjacent coastal waters and shorelines under distinct flow and climate regimes (i.e., tropical and temperate systems); and performing in-situ monitoring in the selected system of the eastern and western Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea.

The project also addresses, through in-situ observations and laboratory experiments, the impacts on distinct commercially valuable species (as part of the human diet) from target regions; implements new approaches to detect and characterize nano-plastics in environmental matrices (i.e.: water, short-term sediment trap, sediment and biota) and ascertain processes of macro-plastics fragmentation, and uses the data generated to feed regional models for the dispersion of micro- and nano-plastics, which in turn will be used to elaborate a model of their dispersion at the Atlantic scale.

The other five projects from the Joint Action Ecological Aspects of Microplastics are:

• ANDROMEDA – Analysis techniques for quantifying nano-and microplastic particles and their degradation in the marine environment – Coordinator: Dr Richard Sempéré, Université d’Aix-Marseille, France

• HOTMIC – Horizontal and vertical oceanic distribution, transport, and impact of microplastics – Coordinator: Dr Mark Lenz, GEOMAR Helmholtz-Zentrum für Ozeanforschung Kiel, Germany

• FACTS – Fluxes and Fate of Microplastics in Northern European Waters – Coordinator: Prof Jes Vollertsen, Aalborg University, Denmark

• microplastiX – Integrated approach on the fate of MicroPlastics (MPs) towards healthy marine ecosystems – Prof Luca Brandt KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

• RESPONSE – Toward a risk-based assessment of microplastic pollution in marine ecosystems – Coordinator: Prof Francesco Regoli, Polytechnic University of Marche, Italy