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Do microplastics affect sulfamethoxazole sorption in soil? Experiments on polymers, ionic strength and fulvic acid

The Science of The Total Environment 2022 39 citations ? Citation count from OpenAlex, updated daily. May differ slightly from the publisher's own count. Score: 40 ? 0–100 AI score estimating relevance to the microplastics field. Papers below 30 are filtered from public browse.
Ben Yu, Ting Zhao, Williamson Gustave, Baochen Li, Yimin Cai, Da Ouyang, Ting Guo, Haibo Zhang

Summary

Researchers investigated how microplastics affect the sorption of sulfamethoxazole antibiotic in soil, finding that polystyrene microplastics increased antibiotic adsorption rates but reduced equilibrium adsorption capacity, with ionic strength and fulvic acid further modifying the interaction in complex soil environments.

Polymers

Microplastics (MPs) and sulfamethoxazole (SMX) are emerging contaminants that are ubiquitous in the soil environment. In this study, we investigated MPs polymer type and soil environmental factor effects on SMX adsorption behavior in the soil system. Our results showed that MPs dosage affected the soil particles' SMX adsorption rate and capacity (Qe). Adding 1 % polystyrene (PS) increased the SMX adsorption rate significantly. The value of K, which represented the adsorption rate, increased from 0.569 h to 1.019 h. However, the addition of MPs reduced the soil's SMX equilibrium adsorption capacity slightly. Moreover, increasing salinity strength enhanced SMX adsorption capacity by MPs significantly. However, increasing calcium ions concentration decreased SMX adsorption in the MPs amended soil due to multivalent cationic bridging and competitive adsorption mechanisms. In addition, we observed that fulvic acid addition inhibited SMX adsorption. This study suggests that the addition of MPs reduced the adsorption of SMX in the soil slightly due to dilution effect. Meanwhile, changes in environmental factors also affected the adsorption behavior of SMX in soil amended with MPs.

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