Pollution alert: Hong Kong drains pour billions of tiny plastic bits into the sea, a threat to marine life, study shows
- City University team one of the first to check presence of microplastic pollutants in storm drains
- Researchers also found high levels of toxic plasticiser which can affect human, animal development
Around 3.2 billion pieces of minuscule plastic pollutants flow from Hong Kong’s drains into the sea every day, according to a study by marine environmental scientists from City University.
“The situation in Hong Kong is special because rainwater flows directly from storm drains into the sea without any processing,” said doctoral student Zhang Kai, part of a 20-member team from the university’s State Key Laboratory of Marine Pollution, who conducted the study.
The team, one of the first to study the presence of microplastic particles in storm drains, said their findings were important because of the impact on marine life and vegetation, and the food chain.
The most common microplastics they found were polypropylene and polyethylene terephthalate particles measuring between 0.3 to 5mm, which can originate from synthetic clothing fabric, plastic bottles and packaging.
Professor Kenneth Leung Mei-yee, director of the laboratory who supervised the study, said: “Synthetic fibres from washing our clothes are one source of microplastics that end up in sewage treatment facilities.
“Microplastics in the air and on the soil will get washed into drains when it rains, so when rainfall is higher, more plastic gets washed into the system.”
The researchers found that between 200 million and 3.2 billion pieces of microplastic flow from the city’s storm drains into the sea every day.