The chance to take part to international research gives to the fellow many opportunities not only to improve its scientific knowledge but also to extend its network. During the first stages of my journey in the SPONGE project, I started to explore in detail the literature about microplastics in the environment, especially in groundwater. Among the published articles, I really appreciated the ones published by a research group from Kangwon National University (Republic of Korea) managed by Professor Jin-Yong Lee. I contacted them to request suggestions and more information about their protocols in sampling and pretreatment of the groundwater samples. The positive discussion resulted in the invitation to collaborate in the preparation of a review paper about the microplastic contamination of groundwater according to the information gained by the available experimental articles.

Only 26 articles providing data about microplastics in groundwater were published until June 2023 and most of them presented many uncertainties and limitations. The lack of shared protocols for sampling and analysis limited the possibility to compare the results. In addition, we found that the hydrogeological information of the sampled aquifer are usually missing, even if the research focus on the groundwater.

In my opinion, one of the most surprising results was to see the geographical distribution of the study sites. They are in fact clustered in 10 Countries (Australia, China, Germany, India, Iran, Italy, Korea, Mexico, Netherland, and USA). Also, the collaborations between the researchers is mostly limited between the aforementioned Countries. Some continents like Africa and South America or densely habituated areas like Southeast Asia, completely miss of any data about groundwater and microplastics. Here many vulnerable communities live and rely their water demand on the extraction of groundwater from shallow and therefore more vulnerable aquifers.

We need to improve our methods and define common protocols which must be used by every research group in order to get comparable results. We should later expand our studies on low- and middle-income Countries, creating collaboration with local scientists in order to support them in the characterization of the quality of their aquifers.

Look forward to see many collaborations begin in the following years, hoping I can give my contribution as well.

If you are interested to read our review paper titled “Microplastic pollution in groundwater: a systematic review” published on Environmental Pollutants and Bioavailability you can check it for free at this link:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26395940.2023.2299545

Enjoy the reading!