'Plastic seas' of Valencia
Gandia graduate student's research says micro-plastic pollution from Cullera to Dénia is 'extreme'
WATERS off the coasts of La Safor, the Ribera Baixa and northern Marina Alta are packed with plastic – it's official.
A master's degree student researching her final dissertation has carried out tests and discovered that micro-plastic pollution in the southern part of the Gulf of Valencia is 'extremely high'.
Nuria Felis is specialising in marine and coastal ecosystem evaluation for her thesis as part of a master's in environmental science at the Gandia campus of Valencia Polytechnic.
Supervised by tutors Silvia Falco and Miguel Rodilla, she collected water samples in 10 different stretches of sea along the 54-kilometre stretch from Cullera (Ribera Baixa) to Dénia (Marina Alta, Alicante province).
They showed up an average of 329,500 pieces of microplastic per square kilometre – a figure significantly skewed by the whopping 900,000-plus pieces near the deltas of the river Serpis and Júcar.
At its worst, this is one piece of micro-plastic per square mere - only a little less than in the so-called 'plastic island' in the north Pacific.
Micro-plastic means pieces of plastic of half a centimetre or less in size – small enough to become hidden in planckton and other sea flora and then be eaten by other marine creatures.
Even by not eating fish, humans cannot avoid consuming micro-plastic, since it also enters the drinking water source and is too small to be filtered out during the treatment process.
It is estimated that the average person eats the equivalent of a credit card a week in plastic.
Nuria Felis says around two-thirds of micro-plastic comes from disintegrating 'macro-plastic', or much larger plastic waste such as bottles, bags and packaging, which is not biodegradable but breaks into tiny chunks through a combination of weather conditions, the force of the current, UV rays, oxygen and temperature.
Much of the rest is what is known as 'primary microplastic', or tiny beads of plastic found in, for example, pharmaceutical products, toothpaste and exfoliating products.
Her studies have led to her finding evidence to support the claim that 80% of plastic in the sea comes from land sources – mainly rivers and canals.
Plastic refuse blows into rivers on the wind or is swept along by the rain, and can travel for hundreds of kilometres.
Nuria has shown this by the difference in micro-plastic content near, and at a distance from, river deltas – compared with the 900,000 pieces per square kilometre at the mouth of the Serpis and Júcar, the water off Piles and Oliva contains around 100,000 per square kilometre.
The Gandia student has now handed in her dissertation on sea plastic and, if she achieves the required grade, wants to continue researching in this area at PhD level.