Quantification of POPs absorbed by beached resin pellet in several Tuscan and Ligurian sites.

During plastic production processes, industries and factories disperse resin pellets in the environment and most of them arrive in the ocean standing there for a lot of time. Due to their specific weight almost the same of salt water, many of types of pellet floats in the marine microlayer, and many of them and many of them end up on the beaches. As the main POPs (persistent organic pollutant) and linear hydrocarbons absorption takes place in the microlayer where pollutant are 105-106-fold concentrated than in the water column [1], pellets can, Nowadays, coastal pollution monitoring consists in analysing environmental media, such as sediments, water or/and biological samples, as mussels. A new challenge started in 2006 with the International Pellet Watch (IPW), proposing the use of resin pellet as no-living passive samplers, in order to avoid long and high cost preparation samples of coastal environmental media. Positive correlation between POPs concentration in mussels and in resin pellet has been proved during IPW, studying a low statistical number of samples [3]. so, absorb or adsorb hydrophobic substance, becoming denser and falling on the seabed [2]. To study a more representative number of samples, obtained thanks the set up of a Local Pellets Watch (, in order to investigate, with greater statistical accuracy, several characteristics of beached pellets, trying to understand if exists correlation between physical/chemical parameters of the beached resin pellets and organic pollutant concentrations [4].