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Investigation of sorption of environmental pollutants to virgin and aged microplastic
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This study investigated how environmental plastics in natural systems undergo photochemical and mechanical degradation, breaking down into microplastic particles that then adsorb pollutants from the surrounding water. The findings help explain how microplastics accumulate chemical contaminants and potentially transfer them through food webs.
Plastics are used in many applications, such as packaging, building and construction, mobility and transport and more. Due to their favourable properties like light weight, flexible processing and low costs their production and consequently their input into natural systems has increased significantly over the last decades. In the environment (photo )oxidation processes and mechanical abrasion lead to the decomposition of the plastics. During this process microplastics (<5 mm) can be formed. It has been shown that environmental pollutants can sorb to these microplastics.[1,2] Nevertheless, knowledge on this topic is still limited. Our work aims at the investigation of the sorption behaviour of the triazole fungicide difenoconazole to simulated microplastics made of virgin polyamide (PA), polypropylene (PP), and polystyrene (PS). Sorption experiments were planned based on a full factorial design with agitation, salinity, and pH value as parameters. The results of our study revealed that difenoconazole indeed, has sorbed to all microplastics tested here. Data analysis showed that agitation is the main influencing factor, whereas salinity and the pH value held little to no significance on the amount of sorbed difenoconazole. To simulate the behaviour of naturally aged microplastics, sorption to cryo-milled PP and acid-treated PA was also studied. The thus treated samples were characterised by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), gel permeation chromatography (GPC), and dynamic scanning calorimetry (DSC). FTIR spectroscopy did not show any changes in the chemical structure but GPC and DSC measurements indicated a systematic chain scission of the treated PA. Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images illustrate that milling of the microplastics leads to non-spherical, star-shaped particles. This fact has a huge influence on the surface properties and consequently on the absorption. The results of our study are important in terms of i) creating realistic sorption scenarios with relevant parameters for the sorption process, as well as for ii) the choice of proper materials to simulate naturally occurring microplastics. We could show that not only the characteristics of the material like particle size distribution or surface properties are important, but also the applied analytical technique which is used for the characterization of the material . Since there is no standard methodology for microplastic identification and quantification, we suggest to combine several methods to obtain a reliable overall characterization.
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