ArticleEnvironmental science & technology2025
A Quantitative Environmental Risk Assessment for Microplastics in Sewage Sludge Applied to Land.
Article in Environmental science & technology, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Analysis and Risks of Emerging Contaminants and Microplastics in Natural and Treated Waters and Human Health: A Critical Review.Journal of xenobiotics · 2026Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The application of sewage sludge to land delivers high levels of microplastics (MPs), contributing to soil contamination and chronic effects on soil biota. Despite this, the quantitative chronic risk assessment of MPs in sludge-amended soils (SAS) to soil biota has not been thoroughly addressed, and none has been done directly on sludge samples. Here, we combined environmental exposure and species sensitivity distributions, built on published data, with two-dimensional Monte Carlo simulations to characterize the risk from MPs in sludge samples and in SAS, testing worst-case and realistic case scenarios of sludge behavior in soil. Contamination with MPs frequently exceeded the concentration likely to affect more than 5% of the species. Risk characterization showed that the worst-case MP scenario affects 39% of species, while the realistic scenario affects 15-18% of soil species, implying that the current state of sludge application fails to protect 95% of soil biota. The percentage of species affected by MPs approximately doubled in SAS. Our conservative results suggest that regulatory limits on MPs in sludge being applied to land should be urgently considered.
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Registered trials
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