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Impacts of Eco-Corona on Surface Properties of Nanoplastics
Summary
When tiny plastic particles in the environment get coated with natural materials from soil and water (called an "eco-corona"), it changes how they behave and move through sand and soil. This coating can make different types of plastics act more similarly to each other, which could affect how they spread through the environment. Understanding how these coated plastic particles move is important because it helps us predict where microplastics might end up in our water and food supply.
Plastics exposed to environmental conditions can develop eco-coronas. Here, we investigated how the eco-corona impacts the surface properties and transport of nanoplastics in unsaturated sand. Four different plastics, polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS), and poly(butylene adipate terephthalate)-based (PBAT) were used in pristine and UV-weathered forms. The nanoplastics were exposed to a water-extractable soil solution to form an eco-corona. Transport of nanoplastics was studied under unsaturated flow condition at 40\% water saturation. Weathering and eco-corona had no obvious effect on the transport of nanoplastics under low ionic strength conditions. For most UV-weathered nanoplastics the zeta potentials became less negative after UV-weathering, indicating decreased surface charge, except for PBAT, whose zeta potentials became considerably more negative after weathering. The eco-corona caused the zeta potentials of the different nanoplastics to become more similar, except for pristine PBAT, which had a considerably less negative zeta potential than the other plastics. The eco-corona decreased contact angles in some cases (PP and PS) but increased the contact angle in others (PE and PBAT). This study demonstrates that both UV-weathering and eco-corona formation modify the physicochemical properties of nanoplastics, such as surface charge and hydrophobicity, with a tendency to make different plastics more similar.