Plastics in lakes sediments

Lake sediments provide an excellent archive o understand past environmental settings thus can help to reconstruct human influence on aquatic freshwater habitat. Since the 1950s, plastics consumption has strongly increased across the globe and large amounts of this plastic is not recycled and is disposed into the environment. Through fluvial systems, plastics are transported and deposited in sediment sinks such as lakes and oceans where the it accumulates. Sediments containing such plastics can be used to assess their fate pathways, mass loads and accumulation rates in different environmental systems. We run this research topic through bachelor thesis and research projects that collect data from plastics content in sediment cores and surface sediments of lakes. This will help to understand the sedimentation process of plastics and to constrain deposition hotspots. In addition, we will also be testing if and how plastics particles can be used as a dating tool as well as a tracer for specific processes (currents, remobilization etc..). 

Grab sampler for surface samples
Potential plastics particles from a lake sediment sample