Current Research Trends for Treatment of Microplastics

Microplastics are recognized as critical and serious environmental problem in worldwide. Plastics are inexpensive, lightweight, excellent in processability, and various in material-specific properties. Along industrial development, the production and disposal amount of plastics are also rapidly increasing. In particular, abundant plastic wastes are eventually disposed into marine environment with harmful impacts on the ecosystem. Therefore, lots of relevant studies were recently progressed in various fields. However, many studies are being just conducted due to its difficulty in applying a general treatment method for those small particle sizes and their various characteristics. In the meantime, lots of researches are being conducted on applying methods using physical properties such as specific gravity, magnetic, and electrostatic separation, which are beneficiation processes of minerals. However, since it is still in the laboratory stage, the development of larger scale separation technology for efficient treatment is urgent.