what is the effect of microplastics in agricultural soil. please answer in 10 lines
Answers
White stripes, each about a meter wide, painted the land for as far as the eye could see. I was visiting the dry areas of the autonomous Ningxia region in northwest China with colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the nonprofit Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International. Those strips of plastic sheeting, I was told, allow farmers to grow cash crops and grains despite the desert-like conditions. The sheets, usually composed of polyethylene, help conserve water, suppress weeds, and boost soil temperatures, effectively increasing crop yields by 20 to 60 percent.
The use of plastic “mulch” to grow crops, known as the White Revolution, began in China in the late 1970s, and now covers 20 million hectares of the country’s agricultural land, an area equivalent to half the size of California. Other countries in the Middle East, Europe, and North America also use plastic mulch.
Used sheets are expensive to collect and discard or recycle, leading some farmers to leave them on the field or illegally dump or burn them; often the sheets are not fully removed, as the thin plastic readily tears into small fragments that remain on the farmland, forming what is known in China as “white pollution.” As new plastic mulch is applied year after year, soils can become enriched with plastic residues, which change the physical and chemical properties of the habitat that so many plants, animals, and microorganisms call home.