Huge amounts of plastic from artificial grass end up in the sea

Pieces of synthetic grass could make up a big portion of the plastic discovered within the seawater near a serious metropolis, a research in Spain has revealed.

Liam de Haan on the University of Barcelona and his colleagues analysed 217 water samples collected off the coast of Barcelona, in north-east Spain, and 200 from the Guadalquivir river in Seville, within the south-west of the nation, collected between 2014 and 2021.

They targeted their evaluation on plastic items bigger than 5 millimetres, excluding smaller particles, often called microplastics, as a result of it’s tougher to find out the place they arrive from, says de Haan.

Fibres that make up synthetic grass are often very skinny, lengthy and curled, and inexperienced in color, he says, making them straightforward to determine.

In Barcelona, fibres from synthetic grass accounted for 15 per cent of plastic items bigger than 5 millimetres within the samples from inside 1 kilometre of the shore. “We were really surprised that nobody had reported this before,” says de Haan.

The focus of synthetic grass fibres floating within the sea was as excessive as 213,200 fibres per sq. kilometre in some locations. Barcelona’s giant inhabitants – round 1.7 million – and the big variety of synthetic sports activities pitches within the metropolis most likely account for why the determine is so excessive, says de Haan.

In the Guadalquivir river in Seville, the common focus of plastic air pollution from synthetic grass was on common 50 instances decrease than within the seawater off Barcelona.

This distinction might be right down to the truth that the river merely flushes plastic into the ocean, whereas plastic can accumulate extra within the sea, says de Haan. Seville additionally has a much smaller inhabitants than Barcelona, at simply over 700,000 individuals.

De Haan says the problem is more likely to be international. “I think it’s pretty implausible that this is only happening in Spain,” he says. Since we don’t know the way a lot synthetic grass breaks down into microplastics and nanoplastics, and the way a lot this contributes to plastic air pollution in water our bodies, the issue might be even greater, he provides.