How plastics affect water

In part five of her series on plastics, Julie Borgerding July talks about the long- and short-term effects of plastic on our water systems.

Clean water is crucial for our land and human health. Plastic, as handy as it is, can negatively affect the water that we depend on for sustenance and recreation. You can turn this effect around with thoughtful choices. 

The whole production cycle of plastic affects water. Water releases, cools and cleans in the fracking process to extract petroleum from earth and in making plastic. Then that water is returned to the earth. Often companies do not contain chemicals to the specifications of the law and water is contaminated near those sites. Water moves easily no matter where it is and can leach chemicals into local water supplies. 

As noted previously, much of the plastic we use gets put in landfills. From there, plastic degrades and filters down into water. Industrial sludge, filtered from treatment facilities and factories, is also deposited into the ground and as it rains, the microplastic in that sludge, (saved from a more direct water supply) gets into soil and eventually gets into groundwater. It also might end up directly deposited in fields on which our food grows. Washing machine water is another source of microplastics. Much of our clothing material is petroleum or recycled plastic based and polyester and acrylic microfibers are deposited by our washing machines into water systems and can end up in bodies of water where it is ingested by marine life or in fields where food is grown. 

A spokesperson from the St. Paul Regional Water Service (SPRWS) stated that microfibers are likely in our water; SPRWS does filter PFAs which do cause concern, but does not monitor for microfibers as the World Health Organization says that there is not enough evidence that indicates they are a human health concern. Sludge from drinking water purification is analyzed at the University of Minnesota, then sold to farmers as an alkaline fertilizer. 

Our oceans and marine life are important carbon sinks (holders of carbon) in the carbon cycle. But plastic pollution, 80% of which comes from land and freshwater rivers, is interfering in many ways: floating plastic breaks down releasing carbon into the air, plastic eating marine animals’ excretions sink more slowly and release more carbon to the air, and marine life that ordinarily holds carbon during their lives (such as whales which can hold as much as 30 tons during their life cycle) die earlier and may be held on the surface in plastic entanglements, so are compromised in their carbon holding role in two ways – shorter lives and not sinking to the ocean bottom. Phytoplankton and other small creatures are also affected in their carbon sequestering role by microplastic ingestion. 

In St. Paul we are blessed with good water, but our consumption habits may come back to haunt us. Here is what we can do.

• Wear clothes more times between washes
• Add a filter to our washers – newer machines may have them. 
• Be more intentional about how we purchase things in plastic and be intentional about what we do with residual plastic.