Chemical Analysis of Microplastics and Nanoplastics: Challenges, Advanced Methods, and Perspectives.
By N. Ivleva. Chemical Reviews, 2021
886 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Microplastics and nanoplastics have become emerging particulate anthropogenic pollutants and rapidly turned into a field of growing scientific and public interest. These tiny plastic particles are found in the environment all around the globe as well as in drinking water and food, raising concerns about their impacts on the environment and human health. To adequately address these issues, reliable information on the ambient concentrations of microplastics and nanoplastics is needed. However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are extremely complex and diverse in terms of their size, shape, density, polymer type, surface properties, etc. While the particle concentrations in different media can vary by up to 10 orders of magnitude, analysis of such complex samples may resemble searching for a needle in a haystack. This highlights the critical importance of appropriate methods for the chemical identification, quantification, and characterization of microplastics and nanoplastics. The present article reviews advanced methods for the representative mass-based and particle-based analysis of microplastics, with a focus on the sensitivity and lower-size limit for detection. The advantages and limitations of the methods, and their complementarity for the comprehensive characterization of microplastics are discussed. A special attention is paid to the approaches for reliable analysis of nanoplastics. Finally, an outlook for establishing harmonized and standardized methods to analyze these challenging contaminants is presented, and perspectives within and beyond this research field are discussed.
Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d331a39db593959827c8a4789c128539d7647594
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
- Martin J. M. van Velzen
- H. Leslie
- Dick Vethaak
- S. Brandsma
- J. Garcia-Vallejo
- M. Lamoree
Citations in the corpus
- Discovery and quantification of plastic particle pollution in human blood. (2022, background): “…time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry (Jungnickel et al., 2016) and photoinduced forced microscopy (Ten Have et al., 2021), among others (Ivleva, 2021), to characterize the smallest particles, requiring sensitivity and selectivity of low and submicron particles that are expected in…”