Nanoplastic from mechanically degraded primary and secondary microplastics for environmental assessments

Abstract

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Atmospheric Micro and Nanoplastics: An Enormous Microscopic Problem

“…Among the physical factors that induce deterioration of plastics, the weathering and the mechanical breakdown are the main ones. A recent study from El Hadri et al [70] reports a top-down method, based on mechanical degradation, to obtain NP from MP under laboratory conditions. The size distribution, morphology and surface charge of the resulting NP are analyzed and the authors found that they are highly polydispersed with different shapes and negatively charged surfaces.…”

Fluorescent plastic nanoparticles to track their interaction and fate in physiological environments

“…A few groups have studied plastic nanoparticles made of polymers other than PS, and reported the creation of PET or PVC particles through laser ablation [31,32] or PET, PE, and Nylon particles via chemical re-precipitation or microemulsions [33][34][35]. Some additional work has been done involving the chemical synthesis of PP particles [36] and the generation of PE particles through mechanical means [37]. However, techniques used to characterize the particles presented in these studies are widely varied, and all methods reported have only been tested for a limited number of plastic types.…”

The fate of plastic in the ocean environment – a minireview

“…nanoplastics. This has been documented as a result of shear forces in the digestive tracts of krill and perhaps other crustaceans, 96 due to abrasion in a mill 106 or blender, 94 and even as a result of turbulence 95 (see section on 'Nanoplastics' for further discussion).…”

“…Both mechanical forces, and probably more importantly, photooxidation are known to degrade polymers leading to a huge diversity of daughter products such as long and short-chain alkanes and carbonyl compounds, oligomers and nanoplastics. 14,29,30,[94][95][96]106,108 Incubation experiments with natural surface water microbial communities from the Mediterranean Sea 29 and an estuary of the subtropical NW Atlantic 31 showed that microbes were able to utilise at least some of the water-soluble fraction of daughter products generated during photooxidation of PE, PP, and PS. Furthermore, these compounds stimulated microbial growth, yet it seems that PE derived daughter products are less bioavailable and might even inhibit microbial growth.…”