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Insights into Microplastics: from Physical and Chemical Characterisation to its Potential as a Vector.
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This review paper covers the physical and chemical characterization of microplastics, their diversity in size, shape, and chemical structure, and their potential to act as vectors for environmental contaminants. It also discusses challenges in sourcing representative microplastic reference particles for laboratory research.
Particles with the largest dimension of less than 5 mm, also termed as microplastics (MPs), gained a lot of scientific and media attention in the last decade. MPs in the environment are of importance because of their potential for further fragmentation, accumulation, and impact on biota in the terres-trial and water environments. MPs research is challenging due to their diversity in size, shape, and chemical structure. For research purposes, MP particles can be purchased, but in terms of chemical structure, they properties might not correspond to the ones of MPs, found in the environment. Com-pared to purchased MPs, plastic products in the environment can contain different additives, despite being the same polymer type as purchased MPs. Therefore, for environmental studies preparation of MP particles from plastic products is preferable. In this contribution two methods for laboratory preparation of MP particles, different sizes and polymer types, are presented. Method using ultra-sound probe was found to be suitable for obtaining polyester fibres from thin sewing thread, while cryogenic milling was found to be preferable method for MPs preparation from larger and thicker plastic particles. In this way, MPs of other types of plastic (polyethylene terephthalate, polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene) were prepared from beforehand manually cut plastic particles, originating from everyday plastic products. Keywords: Miroplastics; Cryomilling; Separation; Challenges of preparation; Surface topology
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