Abstract
As plastic marine debris continues to accumulate in the oceans, many important questions surround this global dilemma. In particular, how many descriptors would be necessary to model the degradation behavior of ocean plastics or understand if degradation is possible? Here, we report a data-driven approach to elucidate degradation trends of plastic debris by linking abiotic and biotic degradation behavior in seawater with physical properties and molecular structures. The results reveal a hierarchy of predictors to quantify surface erosion as well as combinations of features, like glass transition temperature and hydrophobicity, to classify ocean plastics into fast, medium, and slow degradation categories. Furthermore, to account for weathering and environmental factors, two equations model the influence of seawater temperature and mechanical forces.
Highlights
As plastic marine debris continues to accumulate in the oceans, many important questions surround this global dilemma
Due to a wide variety of environmental factors, such as exposure to UV radiation, wind, waves, seawater, and bacteria, plastic waste experiences concurrent influences leading to cracking, surface erosion, abrasion, and breakdown to mesoplastic (~5–20 mm), large microplastic (~1–5 mm), small microplastic (~20–999 μm), and nanoplastic (
This study focuses on plastics in direct contact with either real seawater or artificial seawater
Summary
As plastic marine debris continues to accumulate in the oceans, many important questions surround this global dilemma. A second group in Fig. 1b comprises insoluble plastics [0 < LogP(SA)−1 < ~0.013 Å−2] susceptible to surface erosion via biodegradation, abiotic hydrolysis through exposure to seawater, and photodegradation.
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