1. Introduction
Today, the proportion of plastics in waste is rapidly increasing as the demand for plastic products and disposable plastics increases in daily life. In addition, since the spread of COVID-19, the amount of municipal waste, including plastic waste such as packaging materials, styrofoam, and plastic bag, has increased significantly as time at home increases, food delivery and online shopping have increased1). Among the waste treatment methods, incineration was considered a way to completely remove plastic, but incineration facilities are classified as one of the sources of microplastics (MPs) and plastic waste is also called MPs factory2). It is known that incineration ash generated from incineration facilities contains trace inorganic and organic chemicals such as harmful heavy metals and dioxins. Microplastics can act as a carrier for various pollutants due to their small particle size and large specific surface area, so they can adsorb and move with pollutants. And according to other studies, heavy metals can elute from the plastic itself3). Accordingly, in this study, microplastics were quantitation and qualitation in incineration bottom ash collected from various incineration facilities, and the source of these MPs was reviewed. In addition, the heavy metal content of incineration ash was investigated, and the leaching amount of heavy metal from incineration ash was also investigated. The heavy metals investigated in this study were Cu, Pb, Cr, Cd, and Hg.
2. Materials and methods
Incineration bottom ash collected from 11 municipal waste incineration facilities (4 large and 7 small and medium-sized) were used. First, the moisture, combustible, and ash of the sample were analyzed according to the Korean Official Test Standards of Waste. In addition, the size of bottom ashes was classified into 5mm or more, 1-5mm, and 1mm or less to confirm the distribution of MPs according to the particle size of the incineration ash. The microplastic quantitation and qualitation experiment was conducted for each particle size, and each sample was mixed with a ZnCl2 solution, stirred with a magnetic stirrer for 10 minutes, and then separated into a solid/liquid portion. The solid/liquid separation was carried out by removing the precipitate from the bottom of a funnel, and the previous processes were repeated twice more for the precipitate generated. After filtering the supernatants with a 106 μm mesh of stainless-steel sieve, microplastics-like particles (MLPs) were selected under a microscope, and the composition was analyzed using FTIR. Among the MLPs detected, the particles were counted as microplastics only when the HQI (hit quality index, range 0 to 1) score of FTIR was 0.7 or higher and similarity to the library spectrum was met.
3. Results and discussions
As a result of the analysis, the amount of microplastics detected for each incineration ash was different, ranging from ND~8 items/kg. PET, which is the most commonly produced and used plastic material in everyday life, was detected among the identified plastic (Figure 1). And in this study, the leaching concentrations of heavy metals from incineration ash were 0.9~2.6 mg/L of Cu, 0.06~0.7 mg/L of Pb, and 0.04~0.86 mg/L of Cr, and Cd and Hg were not detected. In addition, the heavy metal contents were 1,283~6,209 mg/kg of Cu, 91~1,948 mg/kg of Pb, 219~637 mg/kg of Cr, 5~13 mg/kg of Cd, and Hg was up to 0.05 mg/kg, and the correlation with microplastic concentrations was not confirmed. However, other study results suggested a positive correlation between heavy metal content and microplastic concentration4,5). View PDF for the rest of the abstract.
抄録全体を表示