High microplastics levels found in Russia’s Lake Baikal

The waters of Russia’s Lake Baikal are contaminated with high levels of microscopic plastic particles and fibres that most likely come from packaging and fishing nets.

Research published in Water Resources suggest the particle number concentrations of microplastics in the water of the world’s largest and oldest freshwater lake is of the same order of magnitude as the concentrations seen in oceanic ‘garbage patches’ where plastic waste accumulates.

While microplastics – fragments and fibres less than five millimetres in size – have been studied extensively in oceans and lakes around the world, relatively few studies have been done on their presence in Russia’s lakes and rivers.

A team of researchers from Moscow State University, led by Olesya Ilyina, trawled for plastic particles in the surface waters at four sites on the coast of Lake Baikal, all of which were either densely populated, or key tourism destinations.

After trawling an area of 0.01068 km² and filtering 1,676 cubic metres of water, they found 446 plastic particles, 91.6% of which were classed as microplastics. The average number of particles per unit of surface area of the lake was relatively high – around 41,800 particles per km² – even compared to other lakes around the world with a similar density of population, such as the nearby Lake Khubsugul in Mongolia, which has an average concentration of around 20,200 particles per km². The highest concentration of microplastics found in the study – around 75,000 particles per km² – was similar to the average values for ocean ‘garbage patches’ in subtropical areas.

However, Ilyina says that while numerous, the particles were small. Four-fifths of the microplastic particles were either transparent or white, and nearly 60% of were identified as coming from plastic films, such as those used in food packaging. There was also a small but significant number of green polypropylene fibres, consistent with the debris from fishing nets.

Ilyina says the fishing industry in Lake Baikal is small compared to that of other regions due to restrictions placed on commercial fishing, “but there is a rather high quantity of fishing nets present in the bottom sediments,” she says, which are left behind from past fishing activity. She hopes that there might be plans to remove these abandoned nets so they don’t continue to shed microplastics.