Conférence - « Is there more plastic in rivers than in the Ocean? Plastic pollution in rivers »

La Fédération de recherche en environnement et durabilité (Fered) organise, vendredi 14 juin à 11h30, une conférence en ligne intitulée « Is there more plastic in rivers than in the Ocean? Plastic pollution in rivers ». Elle sera animée en anglais par :

• Pierre Girard, de l'Université Fédérale de Mato Grosso, Brésil
• Martin Blettler, de l'Institut National de Limnologie, Argentine
• Romain Tramoy, du Laboratoire Eau Environnement et Systèmes Urbains (Leesu), École des Ponts ParisTech et Université Paris-Est Créteil

Résumé :  

In the last two decades the studies on plastic pollution have grown exponentially. The realization that there was a new “continent” of plastics in the Pacific Ocean jump started this research field. Thus, the contamination of the oceans and other large bodies such as the great lakes was, at the beginning, the main research focus. As plastic production occurs on land, rivers were mainly seen as conduit for plastics to the sea and research on plastic pollution in river systems aimed mainly at figuring out transport of micro and macroplastics toward oceans. However, more recently, mass balance calculations hinted that only a fraction of what is littered on the continents ever reached the sea. Plastic contamination in river systems is now a field of its own, concerned by transport, retention and consequences for the biota and ecosystems of rivers and their floodplains. Important questions still have to be solved: how much plastics is currently trapped in the world river systems, how do the exchange between river system compartments (channels, banks, sandbars, floodplains, lakes, etc.) influences transport, retention, fragmentation and degradation of plastics? What factors have a greater influence on the retention of plastic in rivers (vegetation, man-made infrastructure, river flow characteristics, etc.)? What is the contribution of plastic river pollution to greenhouse gases and biodiversity decline? How are these questions tackled? With what methods? In this context, large rivers and their extensive floodplains have been little studied. We will briefly present the state of the art concerning macroplastic fluvial pollution as well as new research projects and how they pretend to solve some of these questions.

Un replay sera disponible sur le site de la Fered.