Visible light photocatalytic degradation of microplastic residues with zinc oxide nanorods
By T. Tofa, K. L. Kunjali, S. Paul, Joydeep Dutta. Environmental Chemistry Letters, 2019
403 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microplastics have recently become a major environmental issue due to their ubiquitous distribution, uncontrolled environmental occurrences, small sizes and long lifetimes. Actual remediation methods include filtration, incineration and advanced oxidation processes such as ozonation, but those methods require high energy or generate unwanted by-products. Here we tested the degradation of fragmented, low-density polyethylene (LDPE) microplastic residues, by visible light-induced heterogeneous photocatalysis activated by zinc oxide nanorods. The reaction was monitored using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, dynamic mechanical analyser and optical imaging. Results show a 30% increase of the carbonyl index of residues, and an increase of brittleness accompanied by a large number of wrinkles, cracks and cavities on the surface. The degree of oxidation was directly proportional to the catalyst surface area. A mechanism for polyethylene degradation is proposed.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Materials Chemistry, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cffb8ee56ac9a5fe811551058f368cbb3c60e5fa
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Citations in the corpus
- Enhanced Visible Light Photodegradation of Microplastic Fragments with Plasmonic Platinum/Zinc Oxide Nanorod Photocatalysts (2019, methodology): “Changes in the carbonyl index (CI) determined by the ratio of the area under the absorbance of 1710 cm−1 to the area under the reference peak at 1380 cm−1 and the Vinyl index (VI) which is the ratio of area under the absorbance of 909 cm−1 to the area under the reference peak at 1380 cm−1 were monit”
- Contributions of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy in microplastic pollution research: A review (2020, methodology): “…using FTIR techniques by many researchers (Andrade, Fernandez-Gonzalez, et al., 2019; Auta et al., 2018; Bond et al., 2018; Brandon et al., 2016; Costa et al., 2018; Nazareth et al., 2019; Rajakumar et al., 2009; Ren et al., 2019; Tang et al., 2019; Tofa et al., 2019; von Friesen et al., 2019).”