Plastics, Microplastics, and Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances Abundance and Composition Across Water Resources: Estimation and Uncertainty
Abstract
Plastic trash, microplastics, and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are co-occurring, ubiquitous, and persistent urban pollutants with demonstrated adverse impacts on human and ecosystem health. Though their sources may differ, urban runoff is a major transport pathway for all three of these pollutants into surface waters. Given emerging regulatory and legislative responses at federal and state levels, accurately estimating these pollutants’ loads with measures of variance is critical to monitoring, determining risk, informing policy design, and ensuring compliance with remediation requirements. However, field campaigns to directly measure plastic trash, microplastics, and PFAS are time- and cost-intensive, resulting in data limitations. In the case of plastic trash, current single-pass surveying methods are known to underestimate environmental loads, and lack measures of effort and variance, preventing cross-study comparisons. Surface waters receiving plastic trash, microplastics, and PFAS via urban runoff may interact with groundwater, an important drinking water resource. Yet, studies measuring microplastics in groundwater are rare, and studies measuring both microplastics and PFAS in groundwater as well as in potentially interacting surface waters are rarer still. This dissertation addresses these limitations and knowledge gaps. In Chapter II, we demonstrate that multiple-pass removal surveys with depletion modeling, a well-established method in fisheries…
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