Study of the presence of microplastics in agricultural soils of the Canary Islands

Abstract

Currently, microplastics play a very important role in the environment, since they spread easily through different routes (air, water, land ...) and reach land, oceans and even become present in plants, animals and people. There are many studies of the impact of both plastics and microplastics on the aquatic environment. However, there are studies on microplastics on farms, whether agricultural or otherwise, are very scarce, especially in the Canary Islands, of which no study has been carried out so far. Therefore, this project is focused on the analysis of different soil samples from different farms to establish statistics of the most frequent types of microplastics by color and shape in terms of each individual farm, grouping of farms according to the type of crop, depth of the layer and size of the plastic particles. It can be established that the three most found types of microplastics are fibers, irregulars and threads, and that the colors that occur most are black and white. Most microplastics are obtained from the 2.5 mm sieve (medium size) and the first filtrate. Most of it is found, in general, in the surface layer. Finally, most microplastics are found in fields with conventional crops, and this is related to the type of production, the materials used and the type of soil.