Abstract
It is becoming increasingly important to develop assessment criteria for the quality of nanoplastics studies. This study is an attempt to establish such criteria based on those developed for engineered nanomaterials, the GUIDEnano and DaNa criteria being two representatives. These criteria were applied to studies on polystyrene nanoparticles (PS NPs), which currently represent the majority of studies on nanoplastics. We compiled a list of existing nanomaterial-related criteria that are not fully relevant to PS NPs and propose additional nanoplastic-specific criteria targeting polymer chemical composition, source, production and field collection, impurities/chemical additives, density, hydrophobicity, colour, and chemical leaching. For each criterion, scientific justification is provided. We conclude that the existing study quality assessments originally developed for nano(eco)toxicity studies can, through refinements, be applied to those dealing with nanoplastics studies, with a further outlook on microplastics. The final quality criteria catalogue presented here is intended as a starting point for further elaborations considering different purposes of an assessment.
Highlights
Plastic contamination has become a central issue in environmental research
None of the studies provided data on specific surface area (Q4), crystalline phase (Q7), radical formation (Q9), porosity and magnetic properties (Q10). Based on these two assessments, we compiled a list of GUIDEnano and DaNa4.0 project (DaNa) criteria that in its present formulation we found less relevant for polystyrene nanoplastics in suspension (Table 1)
We built on two selected study quality evaluation frameworks, GUIDEnano and DaNa, that were developed for engineered metal, inorganic and carbon- based nanomaterials and introduce new nanoplastics-specific criteria
Summary
Plastic contamination has become a central issue in environmental research. Over recent years, in addition to numerous reports on micro plastics pollution (Free et al, 2014; Rezania et al, 2018; Wang et al, 2017; Zhang et al, 2020) nanoplastics have been identified as emerging contaminants of concern (Koelmans, 2019; Lambert and Wagner, 2016). In cases where nanoplastics are made by milling or grinding of larger plastic items, for example for research purposes, these could be referred to as primary nanoplastics as they are intentionally produced, usually in a certain nano-size range (Hartmann et al, 2019). These particles can be used as laboratory models to simulate mechanical weathering and for mation of secondary nanoplastics. A vocabulary defining the most important terms relevant for this study can be found in the Supplementary information
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