Quantifying the Invisible - Micro- and Nanoplastics in the Urban Water Cycle
Abstract
natural materials plastic cannot be degraded easily (Amobonye et al. 2020, Yuan et al. 2020), still, its appearance will change.Exposure to UV radiation causes the plastic to get brittle, and physical abrasion due to wind and wave actions will cause the plastic to fragment into smaller pieces (Andrady 2011).These plastic items can be categorized by their size, shape, source, chemical composition, and density (SAPEA 2019).Most prominently is the definition based on size: all plastic items larger than 5 mm are defined as macroplastics, all items between 1 µm to 5 mm are microplastics (MP), and with a size smaller 0.1 µm plastics are defined as nanoplastics (NP) (Hartmann et al. 2019).however, can be high and no information on the polymer types can be provided (Kroon et al. 2018, Löder and Gerdts 2015).The visual determination of particles > 300 µm is still feasible, but it should be completed by a subsequent polymer identification, using e.g.attenuated total reflectance (ATR)-FTIR (Koelmans et al. 2019, Mintenig et al. 2017).Any visual pre-selection for smaller particles should be avoided as error rates can be unacceptably
Read the paper
Related studies
- Green Chemistry: A Framework for a Sustainable Future
- Nano/micro-plastic, an invisible threat getting into the brain
- Emerging contaminants antibiotic resistance genes and microplastics in the environment: Introduction to 21 review articles published in CREST during 2018–2022
- Water Resources and Sustainable Development
- Nano- and microplastics in the workplace
- Water Enclosure and World-Literature: New Perspectives on Hydro-Power and World-Ecology
Go deeper in Evidence Hub
Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.