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QSPR models for predicting the adsorption capacity for microplastics of polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene

Scientific Reports 2020 66 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.
Miao Li, Haiying Yu, Yifei Wang, Jiagen Li, Guangcai Ma, Xiaoxuan Wei

Summary

Researchers developed quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) models to predict the adsorption capacity of polyethylene, polypropylene, and polystyrene microplastics for organic pollutants, providing computational tools to estimate microplastic-mediated contaminant transport without requiring extensive experimental measurements for each compound.

Study Type Environmental

Microplastics have become an emerging concerned global environmental pollution problem. Their strong adsorption towards the coexisting organic pollutants can cause additional environmental risks. Therefore, the adsorption capacity and mechanisms are necessary information for the comprehensive environmental assessments of both microplastics and organic pollutants. To overcome the lack of adsorption information, five quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) models were developed for predicting the microplastic/water partition coefficients (log K) of organics between polyethylene/seawater, polyethylene/freshwater, polyethylene/pure water, polypropylene/seawater, and polystyrene/seawater. All the QSPR models show good fitting ability (R = 0.811-0.939), predictive ability (Q = 0.835-0.910, RMSE = 0.369-0.752), and robustness (Q = 0.882-0.957). They can be used to predict the K values of organic pollutants (such as polychlorinated biphenyls, chlorobenzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, antibiotics perfluorinated compounds, etc.) under different pH conditions. The hydrophobic interaction has been indicated as an important mechanism for the adsorption of organic pollutants to microplastics. In sea waters, the role of hydrogen bond interaction in adsorption is considerable. For polystyrene, π-π interaction contributes to the partitioning. The developed models can be used to quickly estimate the adsorption capacity of organic pollutants on microplastics in different types of water, providing necessary information for ecological risk studies of microplastics.

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