Abstract:
Plastic pollution has become one of the main issues of this era. The world is progressing day by day. Plastic industries are increasing with time and hence the plastic waste doesn’t go away and end up in ocean every year. According to some reliable source, annual production of plastic has been increased to 381 million tons in 2015 and approximately 8 million metric ton of plastic end up in ocean. Plastic waste removal companies are working for the removal of plastic debris from the ocean but they only focus on the macro plastic, not on microplastic. Microplastics are very smaller in size, they are barely visible in size and they easily escape from the net. From research we came to know that microplastic are more effective to the marine environment more than macro ones. From there they are posing many risks to marine environment.
Other countries are working for the identification and removal of plastic waste from the ocean water and unfortunately there is no such research performed on the Arabian sea. We took an initiative to took step to provide the first-time data of plastics as well as microplastics on the basis of types, size distribution and color in Arabian Sea. We designed our own stainless-steel net, and tested on Rawal lake. Our other aim of testing this on Rawal lake is to compare our data of Arabian sea of that of Rawal lake. Plastic samples are collected with the help of net and stored in beaker. Further experimentation techniques are applied on the samples. First of all, samples are washed with water or alcohol, and separated according to their types. Melt flow index is applied and then FTIR and DSC techniques are applied on plastic samples
