Emergence of Nanoplastic in the Environment and Possible Impact on Human Health.
By R. Lehner, Christoph Weder, A. Petri‐Fink, B. Rothen‐Rutishauser. Environmental Science and Technology, 2019
957 citations recorded by the source corpus.
On account of environmental concerns, the fate and adverse effects of plastics have attracted considerable interest in the past few years. Recent studies have indicated the potential for fragmentation of plastic materials into nanoparticles, i.e., "nanoplastics," and their possible accumulation in the environment. Nanoparticles can show markedly different chemical and physical properties than their bulk material form. Therefore possible risks and hazards to the environment need to be considered and addressed. However, the fate and effect of nanoplastics in the (aquatic) environment has so far been little explored. In this review, we aim to provide an overview of the literature on this emerging topic, with an emphasis on the reported impacts of nanoplastics on human health, including the challenges involved in detecting plastics in a biological environment. We first discuss the possible sources of nanoplastics and their fates and effects in the environment and then describe the possible entry routes of these particles into the human body, as well as their uptake mechanisms at the cellular level. Since the potential risks of environmental nanoplastics to humans have not yet been extensively studied, we focus on studies demonstrating cell responses induced by polystyrene nanoparticles. In particular, the influence of particle size and surface chemistry are discussed, in order to understand the possible risks of nanoplastics for humans and provide recommendations for future studies.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bfea77c02a56e7d93bc00418fd52344f4a866bc4
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Citations in the corpus
- A Detailed Review Study on Potential Effects of Microplastics and Additives of Concern on Human Health (2020, background): “150 m2, with a very thin tissue barrier that is smaller than 1 μm and which could allow nanoparticles to penetrate the bloodstream and all human body [150].”
- Impact of Microplastics and Nanoplastics on Human Health (2021, background): “This barrier is thin enough for nanoparticles to permeate through it and into the capillary blood system, thus, meaning that nanoparticles can disperse through the entire human body [57].”
- Presence of nanoplastics in rural and remote surface waters (2021, background): “The implications of a potentially ubiquitous global nanoplastics load for aquatic ecosystem functioning remain largely unexplored, but nanoplastics have different effects when compared to larger plastic fragments [11, 31].”