Abstract
Microplastic (MP) pollution represents one of the biggest environmental problems that is further exacerbated by the continuous degradation in the marine environment of MPs to nanoplastics (NPs). The most diffuse plastics in oceans are commodity polymers, mainly thermoplastics widely used for packaging, such as polyethylene terephthalate (PET). However, the huge interest in the chemical vector role of micro/nanoplastics, their fate and negative effects on the environment and human health is still under discussion and the research is still sparse due also to the difficulties of sampling MPs and NPs from the environment or producing NPs in laboratory. Moreover, the research on MPs and NPs pollution relies on the availability of engineered nanoparticles similar to those present in the marine environment for toxicological, transport and adsorption studies in biological tissues as well as for wastewater remediation studies. This work aims to develop an easy, fast and scalable procedure for the production of representative model nanoplastics from PET pellets. The proposed method, based on a simple and economic milling process, has been optimized considering the peculiarities of the polymer. The results demonstrated the reliability of the method for preparing particle suspensions for aquatic microplastic research, with evident advantages compared to the present literature procedures, such as low cost, the absence of liquid nitrogen, the short production time, the high yield of the process, stability, reproducibility and polydisperse size distribution of the produced water dispersed nanometric PET.
Highlights
Nowadays, rapid population growth and the daily utilization of polymers for manufacturing non-reusable stuffs for various applications, such as packaging, cosmetics, textiles, detergents, greenhouse films, mulches, fishing nets, etc. cause large amounts of waste products and issues relating to their managing and disposal [1,2,3,4]
World production of municipal solid waste went from 1.3 billion tons in 1990 to 3.81 billion tons after 25 years [5], and plastics are a considerable percentage of this latter value [6,7]
In 2018, almost 29.1 million tons of plastic waste were collected in the European Union, of which 42.6% were incinerated with energy recovery through energy-from-waste, 32.5% were recycled and 24.9% were landfilled [8]
Summary
Rapid population growth and the daily utilization of polymers for manufacturing non-reusable stuffs for various applications, such as packaging, cosmetics, textiles, detergents, greenhouse films, mulches, fishing nets, etc. cause large amounts of waste products and issues relating to their managing and disposal [1,2,3,4]. Cause large amounts of waste products and issues relating to their managing and disposal [1,2,3,4]. World production of municipal solid waste went from 1.3 billion tons in 1990 to 3.81 billion tons after 25 years [5], and plastics are a considerable percentage of this latter value [6,7]. The waste management issues due to plastics can be ascribed to their excessive use and to their small service life and slow degradation time [9]. Between 4.8 and 12.7 million tons of plastic waste are dispersed in the ocean each year [10]. Around 43% of this marine litter is single use plastic, and 27% is fishing gear [12]
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