article · Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology
Microplastics have emerged as severe pollutants across the globe, threatening marine and terrestrial ecosystems as well as human health. These particles are now found widely across air, soil, aquatic habitats, plants, animals, and humans, entering organisms through ingestion, inhalation, and dermal contact. As microplastics age, physical, chemical, and biological transformations increase their mobility, toxicity, and environmental interactions. Exposure can cause scale shedding, restricted movement, stunted growth, immune suppression, inflammation, blood cell toxicity, and death. While these ecological damages pose a threat to global and African biomes aligned with international sustainability goals, their specific dynamics in the African environment remain insufficiently understood. Addressing the problem requires the development of simpler, more affordable analytical methods to detect microplastics alongside effective remediation approaches to remove them from aquatic systems.
Microplastic contamination presents a growing threat to human health, food security, and biodiversity. Because these particles permeate air, water, and soil, they accumulate throughout the food chain, directly affecting aquatic life and people. Understanding their behaviour and establishing lower-cost detection methods is vital to protecting ecosystems and human populations, particularly across vulnerable environments such as those in Africa.
The work highlights early-stage opportunities for analytical tool developers and environmental remediation firms. There is a specific demand for simpler, cheaper environmental monitoring equipment and practical water-treatment remediation techniques. Because the research reviews broad impacts rather than testing a specific product or prototype, practical technologies to address these gaps remain at an early, conceptual stage of development.
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Microplastics (MPs) are emerging pollutants that constitutes a very serious environmental nuisance and menace to the globe in the last decade. The environmental damages from MPs include ecological imbalance of the marine environment, flora, and fauna and these are yet to be understood in the African environment. The sustainable development goals 14 and 15 (SDGs #14 and #15) seek to address the challenges in combating the sustainability of marine and terrestrial lives respectively. Understanding the pollution dynamics of MPs in the environment is crucial to the sustainability of lives globally and in particular Africa soon. Hence, it is imperative to arrest this environmental challenge as swiftly as possible before the collapse of the entire biomes. MPs have been detected in several matrices; soil, air, aquatic environments, plants, fishes, animals, and humans. Their different source routes: ingestion, inhalation, and dermal contact contribute an adverse effect (toxicity) to all spheres of life. To aquatic animals, terrestrial animals, and humans, it limits their movement, leads to the shedding of scales, inhibits growth, suppresses the immune system, and causes inflammation, coagulation, also blood cell toxicity among others, and on the long-run mortality was noted in this review. There is physical, chemical and biological transformation as microplastics age, leading to toxicity, mobility, and great environmental interaction. This has contributed to high MP intake by fish and other aquatic animals. For this reason, researchers should delve into simpler and cheaper ways of analyzing its presence in the environment and develop remediation strategies to curb its presence in the aquatic environment.
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DOI: 10.1016/j.enceco.2024.07.001
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