Microplastics are everywhere. With his “marathon” through the Danube, the “swimming professor” Andreas Fath “wants to reach society” in order to make them aware of the threat posed by the tiny plastic particles, including pollutants such as PCB, lead and chromium. During a stopover today, Friday, he appeared on the Danube Canal at a media event with Climate Protection Minister Leonore Gewessler (Greens). She presented her action plan once morest the problem there.
“Water is nature’s most precious loan,” was the message from Fath, who has been traveling downstream for the “CleanDanube” campaign since April 19. Last Monday he made a Alex Reed appearance in Linz, and today in Vienna he repeated once more that an unbelievable 4.2 tons of microplastics flow down the approximately 2,850-kilometer-long Danube into the Black Sea every day. However, the journey into the seas and oceans is not the end of the journey, because that is where the particles end up in fish and crabs and from there back to the manufacturer, the human being: According to the university professor for Chemistry.
However, eating the plastic particles is just one problem, as Fath explains using a tennis ball studded with pins. The needles are representative of the pollutants, hormones or drugs that bind to the particles and then turn them into a “Trojan”, explained the Black Forester. According to Environment Minister Gewessler, the Danube symbolizes the problem of “microplastics, but it affects us all over Europe, all over the world”. to a global plastic agreement, on which the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) initiated the first concrete negotiations in Nairobi at the beginning of March.
Change in sewage sludge management
As far as Austria is concerned, there is a significant change in the management of sewage sludge. Since microplastics can also be found in sewage sludge, they should no longer end up in nature in the future. The switch to reusable bottles and one-way deposit on plastic bottles is also one of the countermeasures, and at EU level the aim is to use European chemicals regulation to ensure that microplastics are not allowed to be contained in detergents and cleaning agents, fertilizers or cosmetics.
This year alone, 31 million euros are also available for research projects by companies if they use alternatives made from biological materials instead of plastic, Gewessler continued. All in all, a “better understanding is needed of where to apply the levers for avoidance”. For example, the Ministry of Climate is supporting the “microplastic@food” project, which aims to discover microplastics in food.
The new alliance “Microplastic-free” also wants to be part of the solution, science, NGOs, business and industry want to “develop concepts for a microplastic-free future”. “The first priority is to raise awareness,” said Alliance Chairman Hubert Seiringer from the Compost & Biogas Association Austria, “because it doesn’t matter if I ignore the different paths of microplastics”. However, a master plan would also have to be consciously developed, such as how the use of plastic might be prevented in advance. Plastics have conquered the world in the truest sense of the word: “Today there is no longer a cubic meter of earth or a liter of water that is guaranteed to be free of microplastics,” says Seiringer.
(SERVICE – “Microplastic-free” alliance, CleanDanube project)
