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Interaction of chemical contaminants with microplastics: Principles and perspectives
Summary
This review examines how microplastics interact with chemical contaminants in the environment, acting as carriers that can transport pollutants through aquatic food webs. Researchers describe how polymer structure, weathering, and crystallinity influence a microplastic's ability to absorb and release environmental pollutants. The study notes that most research has relied on pristine laboratory plastics rather than field samples, creating a gap in our understanding of real-world contamination dynamics.
Scientific evidences abound of the occurrence of plastic pollution, from mega- to nano-sized plastics, in virtually all matrixes of the environment. Apart from the direct effects of plastics and microplastics pollution such as entanglement, inflammation of cells and gut blockage due to ingestion, plastics are also able to act as vectors of various chemical contaminants in the aquatic environment. This paper provides a review of the association of plastic additives with environmental microplastics, how the structure and composition of polymers influence sorption capacities and highlights some of the models that have been employed to interpret experimental data from recent sorption studies. The factors that influence the sorption of chemical contaminants such as the degree of crystallinity, surface weathering, and chemical properties of contaminants. and the implications of chemical sorption by plastics for the marine food web and human health are also discussed. It was however observed that most studies relied on pristine or artificially aged plastics rather than field plastic samples for studies on chemical sorption by plastics.