Serena Cunsolo

TL;DR: A major ocean plastic accumulation zone formed in subtropical waters between California and Hawaii: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is characterised and quantified, suggesting that ocean plastic pollution within the GPGP is increasing exponentially and at a faster rate than in surrounding waters.

TL;DR: Measurements of the depth profile of buoyant microplastics in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre suggest that surface samplers such as manta trawls underestimate total buoyantmicroplastic amounts by a factor of 1.04–30.0, and estimations of depth-integrated buoyant plastic concentrations should be done across different particle sizes and types.

TL;DR: The findings indicate that NPAC plastics may pose a chemical risk to organisms as 84% of the samples had at least one chemical exceeding sediment threshold effect levels, and surface trawls collected more plastic than biomass, indicating that some NPAC organisms feeding upon floating particles may have plastic as a major component of their diets.

TL;DR: The results show that the need for high-affinity bicarbonate uptake systems ceases at elevated CO2, and the combination of an increased cyanobacterial abundance, improved buoyancy, and higher toxin content per cell indicates that rising atmospheric CO2 levels may increase the problems associated with the harmful cyanobacterium Microcystis in eutrophic lakes.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors focused on removal of organic matter with Fenton reagent from wastewater and sludge samples, which was optimized by implementing a multi-digestion treatment on these samples that had high concentration of complex mixtures of organic material, which interfered with microplastic enumeration.