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The regulation of the environmental behavior of NPs by humic acid: A review
Summary
This review examines how humic acid, a naturally occurring substance in soil and water, interacts with nanoplastics in the environment. Researchers found that humic acid significantly influences how nanoplastics behave, move, and exert toxic effects, suggesting that traditional toxicity assessments based on pure nanoplastics alone may not reflect real-world exposure conditions.
As nanoplastics (NPs) gain recognition as "emerging global pollutants," characterizing their environmental risks has become an international priority. Ubiquitous in soil and aquatic systems, humic acid interacts with these particles-an interaction that illustrates how natural ecosystems respond to anthropogenic contaminants. Elucidating this dynamic refines traditional toxicity assessments (previously based solely on pure NPs), aligning them with complex real-world exposure conditions. This review synthesizes recent advances in understanding how humic acid governs the environmental behavior of NPs, encompassing aggregation kinetics, colloidal stability, pollutant adsorption, bioavailability, ecotoxicity, and environmental influences on their binding affinity. Such insights demonstrate that humic acid-NPs interfacial interactions fundamentally reshape the environmental fate of this pollutant.
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