Wastewater treatment plants serve to collect and treat wastes that are known to include microplastic (MP; synthetic polymer materials <5 mm in size) and other small anthropogenic litter as particles, fibers and microbeads. Here, we determined the microplastic loads and removal efficiencies of three wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) with different treatment sizes, operations and service compositions discharging to Charleston Harbor, South Carolina, USA over the course of a year. Overall, we found that MP concentrations (counts per L) varied within a factor of 2.5 in influent and 4.8 in effluent at each WWTP, and that neither concentrations nor removal efficiencies demonstrated a seasonal trend. The largest wastewater treatment plant in the study, which also employed primary clarification, had the highest MP removal efficiency of 97.6 ± 1.2%. The other two smaller facilities had average removal efficiencies of 85.2 ± 6.0% and 85.5 ± 9.1%. We demonstrate through source modeling that microplastic fiber loads in influent were consistent with service area populations laundering textiles given previously published rates of microplastic generation in washing machines. Using measured WWTP flow rates and MP counts, we find a combined load of MPs leaving all three WWTPs with discharged effluent totaling 500–1000 million MPs per day. We estimate from this the emission of 0.34–0.68 g MP per capita per year in treated wastewater, which may only account for <0.1% of plastic debris input to this metropolitan area's surface waters on an annual mass basis when land-based (mis)managed plastic waste sources are also considered. However, the potential for sorption of chemicals present in wastewater to microplastics and their small size, which confers immediate bioaccessibility, may present unique toxicological risks for microplastics discharged from WWTPs.

Remediation of contaminated sediments remains a technological challenge because traditional approaches do not always achieve risk reduction goals for human health and ecosystem protection and can even be destructive for natural resources. Recent work has shown that uptake of persistent organic pollutants such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in the food web is strongly influenced by the nature of contaminant binding, especially to black carbon surfaces in sediments. We demonstrate for the first time in a contaminated river that application of activated carbon to sediments in the field reduces biouptake of PCBs in benthic organisms. After treatment with activated carbon applied at a dose similar to the native organic carbon of sediment, bioaccumulation in freshwater oligochaete worms was reduced compared to preamendment conditions by 69 to 99%, and concentrations of PCBs in water at equilibrium with the sediment were reduced by greater than 93% at all treatment sites for up to three years of monitoring. By comparing measured reductions in bioaccumulation of tetra- and penta-chlorinated PCB congeners resulting from field application of activated carbon to a laboratory study where PCBs were preloaded onto activated carbon, it is evident that equilibrium sorption had not been achieved in the field. Although other remedies may be appropriate for some highly contaminated sites, we show through this pilot study that PCB exposure from moderately contaminated river sediments may be managed effectively through activated carbon amendment in sediments.

Sorbent amendment with activated carbon (AC) is a novel in situ management strategy for addressing human and ecological health risks posed by hydrophobic organic chemicals (HOCs) in sediments and soils. A large body of literature shows that AC amendments can reduce bioavailability of sediment-associated HOCs by more than 60-90%. Empirically derived biodynamic models can predict bioaccumulation in benthic invertebrates within a factor of 2, allowing for future scenarios under AC amendment to be estimated. Higher AC dose and smaller AC particle size further reduce bioaccumulation of HOCs but may induce stress in some organisms. Adverse ecotoxicity response to AC exposure was observed in one-fifth of 82 tests, including changes in growth, lipid content, behavior, and survival. Negative effects on individual species and benthic communities appear to depend on the characteristics of the sedimentary environment and the AC amendment strategy (e.g., dose and particle size). More research is needed to evaluate reproductive end points, bacterial communities, and plants, and to link species- and community-level responses to amendment. In general, the ability of AC to effectively limit the mobility of HOCs in aquatic environments may outshine potential negative secondary effects, and these outcomes must be held in comparison to traditional remediation approaches.

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Anoxia occurs in bottom waters of stratified estuaries when respiratory consumption of oxygen, primarily by bacteria, outpaces atmospheric and photosynthetic reoxygenation. Once water becomes anoxic, bacterioplankton must change their metabolism to some form of anaerobic respiration. Analysis of redox chemistry in water samples spanning the oxycline of Chesapeake Bay during the summer of 2004 suggested that there was a succession of respiratory metabolism following the loss of oxygen. Bacterial community doubling time, calculated from bacterial abundance (direct counts) and production (anaerobic leucine incorporation), ranged from 0.36 to 0.75 day and was always much shorter than estimates of the time that the bottom water was anoxic (18 to 44 days), indicating that there was adequate time for bacterial community composition to shift in response to changing redox conditions. However, community composition (as determined by PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis analysis of 16S rRNA genes) in anoxic waters was very similar to that in surface waters in June when nitrate respiration was apparent in the water column and only partially shifted away from the composition of the surface community after nitrate was depleted. Anoxic water communities did not change dramatically until August, when sulfate respiration appeared to dominate. Surface water populations that remained dominant in anoxic waters were Synechococcus sp., Gammaproteobacteria in the SAR86 clade, and Alphaproteobacteria relatives of Pelagibacter ubique, including a putative estuarine-specific Pelagibacter cluster. Populations that developed in anoxic water were most similar (<92% similarity) to uncultivated Firmicutes, uncultivated Bacteroidetes, Gammaproteobacteria in the genus Thioalcalovibrio, and the uncultivated SAR406 cluster. These results indicate that typical estuarine bacterioplankton switch to anaerobic metabolism under anoxic conditions but are ultimately replaced by different organisms under sulfidic conditions.