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• Plastic mulching film (PMF), as an effective measure of increasing agricultural yields worldwide, leads to negative effects on resources and environment. • Food–Water–Environment–Plastic nexus effect analysis model is constructed to evaluate the PMF comprehensive effects. • PMF will increase the national average maize yield and address food security for 267.65 million people. • PMF promotion can expand China's maize belt from east to west while exacerbating the water gap in different regions. • Through the implementation of the optimal promotion mode, PMF can facilitate sustainable food production with minimal environmental costs. Plastic mulching film (PMF) enhances grain yields, while leading to negative effects on water depletion, environmental impact, and plastic residues if not properly controlled. By constructing a Food–Water–Environment–Plastic nexus effect analysis model jointly utilizing the WOFOST model, mixed regression, and life cycle assessment, we evaluate the comprehensive effect of PMF promotion in Chinese maize cultivation. 35 cross-cutting scenarios are analyzed to identify the optimal PMF promotion mode and corresponding policy recommendations are given. The results show that PMF will increase China's maize yield, securing food for an additional 267.65 million people in 2050. PMF promotion will aid high-altitude and drought-prone regions to overcome yield constraints, expanding China's maize belt westward. However, promotion will exacerbate regional water supply-demand imbalances in northern and southern China and form a "T-shaped" PMF residue belt. In the optimal scenario, China will increase yield by 48.52 million tonnes, reducing resource and environmental impacts by over 60 % in 2050. [Display omitted] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Solving high-temperature plastic mulching film-induced leaf burning in the first week during tobacco cultivation would take much time and effort. In the present study, the growth as well as the leaf sugar and nicotine contents of seedlings with or without leaf burning induced by high-temperature plastic mulching film were tested at two independent sites in 2015 and 2016 to identify the influence of leaf burning on seedling growth. The results showed that the growth of seedlings with leaf burning was improved with increased leaf area, leaf number and plant height compared to those without leaf burning, combined with an increased seedling survival rate at two sites in two years. In seedlings with leaf burning, the contents of fructose and glucose increased and peaked at 11:00 and 13:00 in the leaf and root, respectively, with an increased root nicotine content beginning at 13:00, highlighting the signalling role of sugars. Activities of antioxidant enzymes including peroxidase (POD), superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase (CAT) were all increased in seedlings with leaf burning. More plant biomass was allocated to roots in seedlings with leaf burning with increased root volume compared to control seedlings, which might facilitate the absorption of water and nutrients from the soil. Our findings demonstrate that high-temperature plastic mulching film-induced leaf burning not inhibited but benefited seedling survival and growth, suggesting that the time and labour-consuming manual plucking of burnt leaves can be avoided during tobacco cultivation.

Abstract: Plastic mulching films (PMFs) in cotton seriously affect the quality of cotton products, especially for spinning and dyeing. However, PMFs still cannot be detected accurately and efficiently. This paper focuses on automatic PMF detection from images captured by a foreign-fiber detection machine. A novel method for PMF detection is proposed. First, object identification is used to detect significant regions. Then an inspection algorithm is used to calculate the weight for each significant region and the highest one is selected as the mulching detection result. Experiments demonstrate that our method can accurately detect and count PMFs in cotton. Compared to existing Otsu adaptive threshold segmentation and object detection methods, our hybrid method shows improvements in film detection of approximately 36% and 10%, respectively. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Plastic debris as new pollutants attracts much attention in the recent years. The plastic mulching films is one of the most important plastic debirs source in the environment. The aim of this work was to investigate the current status of pesticide residues on the plastic mulching films. Based on the QuEChERS method, multi-residue methods for detection of pesticide residues with gas chromatography tandem mass spectrum (GC-MS) and high performance liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrum (HPLC-MS) were developed for the analysis of the pesticides residues in plastic film and soil samples from Tianjin, Hebei and Shandong. The total concentrations of pesticide residues were in the range of 86.4–22213.2 ng/g in plastic film debris, which was about 20 times higher than that in soil (9.3–535.3 ng/g). Residual level of pesticides varied greatly in different samples. The historical usage and recent application of pesticides were the main sources for pesticide residues on plastic films and soil. In short, plastic mulching films could act as a sink for pesticides in farmland and the ubiquitous pesticide residues on plastic films should draw more attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]