Marine Microplastics: Abundance, Ecotoxic Consequences of Associated Anthropogenic Contaminants and Interactions with Microorganisms

The industrial fabrication of plastics has experienced outstanding growth in recent decades. At the current speed of advancement, this production has been estimated to be doubled and plastic waste spilling into the sea can raise up to threefold in the next twenty years. Presently, plastics are the most persistent components of the oceanic trash and the most accounted materials experienced by marine flora and fauna. Microplastics have been accounted for functioning as vectors by sorbing contaminants and leach various harmful plastic additives. In this way, microplastics can act as a sink and source of these plastic-associated anthropogenic pollutants and likely affecting their fate, bioaccumulation and toxic potency. Oceanic microplastics are readily invaded by aquatic microbes, forming “plastisphere” biofilms. Abundance of antibiotic resistance genes and potential pathogenic bacteria are frequently reported in plastisphere. Interactions between microplastics and their probable first-hand consumers, the lower trophic level microbes, are also topic of interest nowadays, with a particular focus on the effects of microplastics in these microbes. The current book chapter expects to highlight the present status of information on the oceanic microplastics affair, related contaminants microorganisms and effects on marine ecosystems.