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Study on Adsorption of Heavy Metals Cu and Zn by Microplastics Under Different Aged Factors

E3S Web of Conferences 2023 3 citations ? Citation count from OpenAlex, updated daily. May differ slightly from the publisher's own count. Score: 35 ? 0–100 AI score estimating relevance to the microplastics field. Papers below 30 are filtered from public browse.
Wenxi Teng, Xiang Zhang, Yalin Yang, Yalin Yang, Jinfeng Zeng, Junfeng Lian, Xinxin Qin

Summary

Researchers examined how aging of polyethylene microplastics under different conditions -- varying pH, dissolved organic matter, and hydrogen peroxide -- affects their adsorption of Cu and Zn, finding that H2O2-induced aging most strongly enhanced heavy metal sorption capacity.

Polymers

Microplastics are widely distributed in a variety of environments, absorbing heavy metals in the environment while aging due to various environmental factors. In this paper, the effects of different aging factors (pH, DOM, and H 2 O 2 ) on the adsorption capacity of heavy metals Cu and Zn on polyethylene microplastics (PE-MPs) were investigated, and the changes in physical and chemical properties of PE microplastics were analyzed. The results demonstrate that H 2 O 2 aging bears the greatest effect on the adsorption effect of PE microplastics, dissolved organic matter (DOM) aging has the least effect on the adsorption effect of PE microplastics, and the adsorption effect of microplastics aged with pH=9 is stronger than that aged with pH=4; the adsorption kinetics model of microplastics fitted to the pseudo-second-order kinetic model, and the thermodynamic model fitted to Langmuir model; aging mainly changed the surface structure of microplastics, increased the Zeta potential of microplastics, introduced more oxygen-containing functional groups, and finally affected the ability of microplastics to adsorb heavy metals. The research provides data reference for understanding the influence of different aging on the adsorption capacity of heavy metals in microplastics.

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