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Papers
20 resultsShowing papers similar to Role of Structural Morphology of Commodity Polymers in Microplastics and Nanoplastics Formation: Fragmentation, Effects and Associated Toxicity in the Aquatic Environment
ClearOn the issue of microplastics in the environment
This paper examines the origins of microplastic pollution, arguing that its emergence is not solely attributable to polymer chemistry advances and cannot be explained simply by physicochemical degradation processes acting on plastic materials.
Facile nanoplastics formation from macro and microplastics in aqueous media
This study examined how nanoplastics form from larger macro- and microplastics in aqueous environments, finding that mechanical and photochemical processes in water accelerate fragmentation beyond what occurs on dry land. The findings help explain nanoplastic abundance in aquatic systems and improve models of plastic environmental fate.
Characterization, occurrence, environmental behaviors, and risks of nanoplastics in the aquatic environment: Current status and future perspectives
This review characterized the occurrence, environmental behavior, and toxicity of nanoplastics in aquatic systems, noting that their small size gives them unique properties — including higher surface reactivity and greater bioavailability — that make them potentially more hazardous than larger microplastics, while also harder to detect.
Surface Chemistry in Environmental Degradation of Polymeric Solids
Researchers reviewed the three main degradation pathways of plastic materials from a surface chemistry perspective: chemical, biological, and mechanical degradation. They described how these processes can occur consecutively or simultaneously in the environment, ultimately producing microplastics. The study provides a scientific framework for understanding how plastics break down into smaller particles, which is essential for developing strategies to address microplastic pollution.
Nano-plastics and their analytical characterisation and fate in the marine environment: From source to sea
Researchers reviewed the sources, environmental fate, organism interactions, and analytical detection methods for nano-sized plastic polymers in the marine environment, concluding that nanoplastics pose the greatest ecological risk among plastic size fractions and that standardized analytical protocols for nanoplastic characterization are urgently needed.
Microplastics and Nanoplastics in the Aquatic Environment: Contamination, Determination and Interaction with Other Contaminants
This review gathers information on microplastic and nanoplastic contamination in aquatic environments, examining their detection methods, environmental persistence, and interactions with other contaminants including their capacity to adsorb and release chemical compounds.
Environmental Toxicity of Emerging Micro and Nanoplastics
This review examines the environmental toxicity of emerging micro- and nanoplastics, covering their sources, degradation pathways, ecological impacts on organisms, and the need for standardized risk assessment frameworks.
Microplastics: From Intrinsic Properties to Environmental Fate
This review examines how the built-in properties of plastics — their chemical structure, additives, and molecular weight — determine how quickly they break down in the environment and what happens when they do. As microplastics degrade, they fragment into even smaller particles that may be more harmful because they can more easily enter living organisms. Understanding these degradation pathways is essential for predicting the long-term environmental and health risks of plastic pollution.
Recent advances in research from plastic materials to microplastics
This review traced recent advances in understanding plastic material degradation into microplastics, covering mechanical, photochemical, and biological fragmentation pathways and reviewing current knowledge on environmental fate and biological effects.
Microplastics, physical-chemical and biological principles of this environmental liability
This review covers the physical, chemical, and biological principles underlying microplastic behavior in the environment, including how particles fragment, sorb contaminants, and interact with organisms. The authors frame microplastics as a complex environmental stressor whose impacts depend on particle size, shape, polymer type, and the specific biological system exposed.
Nanostructural changes in commodity polyethylene during environmental exposure
Researchers studied how polyethylene plastic packaging degrades at the molecular level during environmental exposure, finding that structural stress built up during manufacturing makes the material more prone to fragmentation. Understanding how plastics break apart is key to predicting microplastic generation rates.
Nanoplastics in aquatic environments: Origin, separation and characterization: Review
This review covers the origins, separation methods, and characterization of nanoplastics in aquatic environments. Nanoplastics (1–100 nm) are particularly concerning because their tiny size gives them a large surface area for adsorbing pollutants and allows them to penetrate biological barriers more easily than larger microplastics.
Degradation and Recycling of Polymer Materials
This review synthesizes research on the degradation and recycling of polymer materials, covering microplastic formation, recycling strategies, and plastic degradation mechanisms as responses to the significant environmental damage caused by discarded plastics in ocean and other ecosystems.
Aging behavior of microplastics accelerated by mechanical fragmentation: alteration of intrinsic and extrinsic properties
Researchers mechanically fragmented polystyrene, polypropylene, and PET microplastics to simulate environmental aging, finding that fragmentation alters surface chemistry, crystallinity, and heavy metal adsorption capacity, with aging degree measurable through structural changes.
Microplastic Pollution in the Environment
This book chapter provides an overview of microplastic and nanoplastic pollution as emerging environmental contaminants, describing their formation, persistence in the environment, pathways of biological exposure, and potential toxicity to ecosystems and human health.
A Mini Review on Recent Insight into Degradation of Environmental Plastics
This mini-review summarizes current knowledge on how plastics break down in the environment to form microplastics, covering mechanical, photochemical, thermal, and biological degradation pathways, and identifies key gaps in understanding how environmental conditions and plastic properties influence degradation rates.
Properties and Related Effects of Microplastics in the Aquatic Environment: From the Organismic to Cellular Level
This review covers the properties of microplastics in aquatic environments — including polymer chemistry, particle size, shape, and surface charge — and how these characteristics determine their biological effects from the cellular to organismal level in aquatic organisms.
From Macro to Micro Plastics; Influence of Photo-oxidative Degradation
This study used simulated UV aging to investigate how photo-oxidative degradation of common plastics drives fragmentation from macro to micro scale, characterizing the surface property changes and structural breakdown that generate microplastic particles in the environment.
Challenges and Strategies for Degradation of Microplastics in Environment
This review examines the challenges of degrading microplastics in environmental settings, discussing their hydrophobic nature, persistent covalent bonds, and large specific surface area that attracts co-contaminants, and surveys physical, chemical, and biological degradation strategies alongside remaining technical hurdles to practical implementation.
Microplastic and its effects on the environment
This review describes the formation of microplastics as degradation byproducts of plastic materials and examines their environmental distribution and ecological consequences, with a focus on physical, chemical, and biological removal methods from water and sediment. The authors also describe protocols for collecting, processing, and analyzing microplastic samples in aquatic environments.