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Plastic additives and microplastics as emerging contaminants: Mechanisms and analytical assessment
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Researchers reviewed how chemical additives mixed into plastics during manufacturing — including stabilizers, flame retardants, and plasticizers — can leach out throughout a plastic's lifecycle and pose risks to ecosystems and human health, with microplastics acting as carriers that concentrate and transport these hazardous chemicals.
Plastic additives comprise a plethora of substances that serve numerous purposes in the plastic industry. These can be used to assist the molding of plastics and can contribute to providing optimal performance to the material when molded and used, or, simply, to reduce costs. However, these additives, and non-polymerized monomers, far more hazardous than their poly-counterparts, may be released throughout the entire life cycle of plastics, posing risks to the environment and, ultimately, human health. Hence, many studies have delved into the mechanistic uptake/release of these compounds. Herein, we briefly overview the current knowledge on the underlying processes affecting these mechanisms. We also outline the potential ecological consequences of these hazardous substances and explore some of the prevailing analytical methodologies used for their determination in both environment and laboratory studies. Furthermore, we highlight the key limitations of the currently available literature and present a prospective outlook for future research.
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Leaching and extraction of additives from plastic pollution to inform environmental risk: A multidisciplinary review of analytical approaches
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This review looks at how chemical additives leak out of plastic pollution into the environment, comparing methods used by environmental scientists with established industry testing standards. Plastics contain many added chemicals like flame retardants, stabilizers, and plasticizers that can leach into water and soil. Understanding how these additives are released is important for assessing whether microplastics in food and water are carrying harmful chemicals into the human body.
Leaching of microplastic-associated additives in aquatic environments: A critical review
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This review examined how microplastic-associated chemical additives leach into aquatic environments, summarizing recent advances in understanding release kinetics, phase equilibrium between microplastics and water, and the environmental and health risks posed by organic additives and heavy metals.
Examining the Relevance of the Microplastic-Associated Additive Fraction in Environmental Compartments
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Researchers developed a theoretical framework for sampling and analytical procedures to characterize the speciation of plastic-associated chemical additives across environmental compartments, addressing a gap in routine monitoring programs that have not accounted for additives still bound to plastic particles. The study examines additive bioavailability and plastic-associated transport as key risk factors in environmental contamination assessment.
Les additifs issus des microplastiques : caractérisation, lixiviation et impacts
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This review characterizes plastic additives leaching from microplastics into the environment, examining their physicochemical properties, leaching behavior, and biological impacts, and surveying the growing evidence that many plastic additives are toxic to organisms including marine wildlife and humans.
Understanding the leaching of plastic additives and subsequent risks to ecosystems
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This review explains how chemical additives in plastics -- including plasticizers, flame retardants, and stabilizers -- can leach out of microplastics into the environment and potentially into the human body. Some of these additives, such as phthalates and brominated flame retardants, are persistent, build up in living tissue, and are linked to hormone disruption and other health effects. The authors note that our understanding of the full toxicity risk from leaching plastic additives is still limited.
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