Re: “Plastic becomes marine monster,” Jan. 8.
Every time we do something as common as a load of laundry, thousands of petroleum-based microfibres are washed down the drain with the detergents. Once dispersed into the marine environment via the outfalls, the plastic fibres, and a variety of other clothing fibres, sink and become part of the seabed sediments, or suspend in the water column until bio-fouled with algae and then sink or are consumed by filter-feeding marine life and transferred up the food web.
Microplastics absorb and concentrate other harmful toxins and persist in the marine environment for a long time. Sources of microplastic in the local marine environment include clothing fibre, refuse-site leachate, the breakdown of macroplastics, and many health and beauty products, although manufacturers are starting to phase out plastic “micro beads.”
Secondary treatment will remove nearly 99 per cent of solid waste and sludge from the effluent stream, (about 18 million kilograms a year), and vast quantities of the toxic chemicals and other harmful pollutants that are contained within them. Secondary treatment might not remove all of the chemical pollutants from the effluent, but it will result in the wholesale reduction of many of them, including plastic, processed cellulose and other textile fibres.
Secondary treatment will produce a nearly solid-free effluent, and for the first time in many decades, the deposition of thousands of tonnes of contaminated outfall sediments on our local seabed will cease, a typical example of which can be seen by watching my diving video “CRD sewage outfall pollution in Victoria BC” on YouTube.
Allan Crow
East Sooke
