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A Review on the Fate of Microplastics: Their Degradation and Advanced Analytical Characterization
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This review covers current methods for extracting, degrading, and analytically characterizing microplastics from environmental and biological samples, highlighting major gaps in photo-oxidation, biodegradation, and photo-thermal degradation approaches. Establishing effective microplastic degradation methodologies is essential for reducing their prolonged environmental persistence and preventing ongoing bioaccumulation of plastic fragments and associated toxic chemicals in food chains.
Today, the world is struggling with the colossal amount of microplastics (MPs) due to the tremendous increase in the global production. Presence of MPs in the water samples, biological samples, and its potential to carry lethal chemicals raised the interest on better management of MPs. However, an effective degradation methodology is necessary to decrease the prolonged lifetime of such polymeric materials. So far, very limited reports are available on the degradation methods such as photo-oxidation, biodegradation, photo-thermal oxidative process, subsequent mechanisms involved during the degradation of MPs. Many critical challenges pertaining to those are poorly understood. Particularly, the extraction process, reliable methods to degrade MPs and their analytical techniques, level of MPs contamination in commercially caught fishes and the population at large. Here, we have revisited shortly on current MPs extraction process, various degradation methods using catalyst with their respective mechanisms. Also, the role of most common analytical methods/tools, to identify, analyse the degraded product from MPs, both environment samples and experimental samples, were elaborated. Finally, the solutions to overcome the problems were identified.
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Microplastic Pollution: Review of Degradation, Detection, and Treatment Technologies
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Researchers reviewed the origins, degradation pathways, detection methods, and treatment technologies for microplastics, finding that their persistence and bioaccumulation potential make them a significant threat to ecosystems and human health requiring multifaceted remediation approaches.
Micro- and Nanoplastics in Environment: Degradation, Detection, and Ecological Impact
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Researchers review how micro- and nanoplastics degrade, spread, and accumulate across ecosystems, synthesizing evidence of ecological harm at multiple levels of the food chain and warning that their near-invisible size makes them especially difficult to monitor and regulate.
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