Degradation-fragmentation of marine plastic waste and their environmental implications: A critical review

This review critically evaluates the plastic accumulation challenges and their environmental (primarily) and human (secondarily) impacts. It also emphasizes on their degradation and fragmentation phenomena under marine conditions. In addition, it takes into account the leachability of the various chemical substances (additives) embedded in plastic products to improve their polymeric properties and extend their life. Regardless of their effectiveness in enhancing the polymeric function of plastic products, these additives can potentially contaminate air, soil, food, and water. Several findings have shown that, regardless of their types and sizes, plastics can be degraded and/or fragmented under marine conditions. Therefore, the estimation of fragmentation and degradation rates via a reliable developed model is required to better understand the marine environmental status. The main parameter, which is responsible for initiating the fragmentation of plastics, is sunlight/UV radiation. Yet, UV- radiation alone is not enough to fragment some plastic polymer types under marine conditions, additional factors are needed such as mechanical abrasion. It should be also mentioned that most current studies on plastic degradation and fragmentation centered on the primary stages of degradation. Thus, further studies are needed to better understand these phenomena and to identify their fate and environmental effects.     

Organic pollutants adsorbed on microplastics: Analytical methodologies and occurrence in oceans

The massive use of plastics in several products has generated microplastic debris worldwide. Besides their negative effect on marine organisms by ingestion, microplastics are a contamination vector due to their capacity to transport organic pollutants around our planet. To evaluate the magnitude of this issue, it is necessary to know what kinds of contaminants are adsorbed on microplastics, as well as their concentrations. In order to assess the adsorption and desorption of pollutants from microplastics, effective and reliable extraction procedures are required. In this overview, literature reports, in which extraction, separation and determination methods have been applied to analyse the organic pollutants adsorbed on microplastics, are revised and discussed. Furthermore, the worldwide occurrence of organic compounds found on microplastics in oceans is reviewed and the results obtained from different geographical areas and their global distribution trends are compared. Priority organic pollutants, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, hexachlorocyclohexanes, polychlorinated benzenes, perfluoroalkyl substances or bisphenol analogues, have been widely found on microplastic samples. Future research that focuses on different kinds of emerging pollutants is required.     

Quality assessment for methodological aspects of microplastics analysis in soil

Over the last several years, a number of studies have concentrated on the occurrence, potential sources, and ecological implications of soil systems. However, the studies’ methodological aspects have received little attention. Thus, this study performed a quality assessment for the methodological aspects of soil microplastics studies by adopting the Criteria for Reporting and Evaluating Ecotoxicity Data (CRED) evaluation method. A total of 35 soil microplastic studies have been evaluated in terms of methodological aspects using 13 criteria, namely, sampling methods and strategy, sample processing and storage, sample size, laboratory preparation, clean air conditions, chemical purity, negative control, positive control, sample pre-treatment, microplastics particle data, particle size, particle shape and polymer type identification. The quality assessment findings indicated that no study scored a maximum of two in all criteria, reiterating the urgent need for enhanced quality assurance for future soil microplastics studies. The average quality assessment scores in soil microplastics studies also indicated that the conditions requiring the most improvement involve both the criteria of positive controls and the criteria of clean air conditions. With a value of zero in 13 assessed criterion, the relevance of the study’s findings in environmental risk assessment was restricted, suggesting that future studies should consider strengthening the implementation and reporting of QA/QC protocol. Adoption of proper quality assurance and contamination control measures will guarantee high data quality and establish confidence in the study’s findings, which allow for reproducibility and comparability as well as acceptability to be utilized in risk assessments.     

Microplastics and associated emerging contaminants in the environment: Analysis,sorption mechanisms and effects of co-exposure

Microplastics (MPs) and other emerging pollutants exist together in the environment and their co-exposure represents a source of increasing concern as MPs have been reported to act as carriers of pollutants due to their high sorption capacity. The ingestion of contaminated MPs by organisms can enhance the desorption of pollutants, increasing their bioavailability and toxicity. This review examines the role of MPs as vectors of environmental emerging contaminants. First, the main tools used to identify and characterise MPs and the analytical methods used for the determination of associated emerging contaminants are discussed. Insightful explanations of the sorption interaction between several groups of emerging pollutants and MPs are provided. MP type (polarity, crystallinity, size) and aging process together with the environmental conditions and pollutant properties (hydrophobicity and dissociated forms) are key factors influencing the sorption process. The literature review showed that polyethylene and polystyrene were the most commonly studied polymers. Antibiotics, perfluoroalkyl compounds and triclosan showed high sorption capacities onto MPs. Finally, the effect of co-exposure to MPs-emerging pollutants and bioaccumulation in aquatic and terrestrial organisms is discussed. The combined exposure may impact the toxic effects in different ways, through synergistic or antagonic interactions. Examples of different scenarios are provided, but in general the research conducted on terrestrial systems is scarce. The results revealed a lack of standardization in laboratory studies and in the testing conditions that reflect actual environmental exposure.     

近海微塑料含量的相干反斯托克斯拉曼光谱成像研究

由于塑料工业的发展,微塑料成为一种主要的环境污染物.它在自然界中不易降解,对人类的生存环境及健康都存在不可忽视的潜在危险.因此,环境中微塑料的检测和分析,成为了近年来研究的热点问题.目前人们大多数采用浮选法、密度分离法、离心法等方法提取微塑料,然后放在显微镜下进行目视观察,并结合拉曼光谱分析、傅里叶红外光谱分析、高光谱...     

Investigation of mini-hydrocyclone performance in removing small-size microplastics

Large amounts of microplastics (MPs) have been found in rivers and oceans, bringing great harm to aquatic animals, plants, even human beings. However, the effective removal method of MPs, especially those with small sizes (5–20 μm) is still lacking. This work presents mini-hydrocyclones to remove 10 μm (average size) diameter MPs. The removal performance of nine mini-hydrocyclones with different diameters of spigot and vortex finder is examined experimentally and numerically. The performance of the designed cyclones is evaluated in terms of recovery, water split, concentration ratio and pressure drop. The results show that mini-hydrocyclones are applicable to removing small-size MPs with the maximum concentration ratio at 2.16 and the particle recovery at 51%. The flow characteristics inside the mini-hydrocyclones are analyzed in detail. It is shown that the distributions of water axial velocity and radial velocity could collectively affect the behaviors of small-size MPs in mini-hydrocyclones. Specifically, a larger amount of water split could entrain more fine particles to underflow. Meanwhile, a less frequent alternation of radial velocity between the positive and negative directions on the same side of the cyclone should benefit the removal of small-size MPs.     

微塑料介导重金属在陆生植物中迁移及生物效应的影响

随着地膜在现代化农业中的广泛应用,微塑料在土壤中的残留问题日益严重。环境中释放的微塑料可能会与先前存在的重金属相互作用,导致生物效应(生物积累/毒性),并对人类健康和农产品安全构成威胁。目前,大多数研究集中于单一影响因素在土壤系统中的暴露和转化分析,有关微塑料和共存金属对环境联合影响的相当有限。本文综述了微塑料与重金属来源、相互作用机理与影响因素的研究现状,阐述了陆生植物对二者联合污染的生理响应。此外,未来的研究还应重点探讨微塑料与重金属共同在植物上暴露的具体分子机制、通过食物链对人类健康的影响、与其他混合污染物联合作用及微塑料老化过程对重金属迁移动态变化过程的影响。     

近红外光谱的海水微塑料快速识别

光谱技术与机器学习算法结合快速识别微塑料, 为微塑料的现场检测提供了极大的技术支持,是一个得到极大关注的新领域。近红外光谱检测技术具有检测速度快、灵敏度高、不损坏样品,且可以在不对样品进行预处理的情况下直接检测等特点,在化学分析、质量检测等领域广泛应用。本文基于近红外光谱检测技术,研究比较了结合Support Vector Machine（SVM）和Extreme Gradient Boosting（XGBoost）两种机器学习分类算法,构建微塑料的高速有效识别分类模型。采用微型近红外光谱仪采集了20种常见的微塑料标准样品的光谱数据,为了防止过拟合,对每种样品多次采样,共收集了1 260个微塑料样本,每个样本包含512个数据点。利用XGBoost算法进行特征重要性排序,共提取了对识别准确率影响较大的65个数据点。分别采用SVM算法和XGBoost算法对数据降维后提取的65个数据点建立微塑料快速识别模型,并运用网格搜索（GridSearchCV）对XGBoost算法影响较大的超参数进行选取,确定n_estimators,learning_rate,min_child_weigh,max_depth,gamma的最佳超参数分别为700,0.07,1,1,0.0。为了提高模型的稳定性,识别速率和泛化能力,对模型采用10折交叉验证和混淆矩阵评估;研究结果表明,XGBoost模型对微塑料的识别准确率为97%,而SVM模型对微塑料的识别准确率为95%;XGBoost模型对微塑料识别的正确率优于SVM模型。综上所述,XGBoost模型微塑料识别整体性能优于SVM模型,为实际微塑料快速识别提供技术支撑。     

Current trends and analytical methods for evaluation of microplastics in stormwater

Stormwater runoff is an important source of microplastics (plastic particles <5 mm) into the aquatic environment and studies documenting the microplastics abundance and their characteristics are constantly expanding. The lack of standardized methods as well as the development of many analytical techniques to evaluate microplastics greatly influence reported results and calls for a better understanding of approaches adopted by microplastic studies in stormwater. Hence, this paper aims to systematically review currently employed methods for sampling, isolating and identifying microplastics and to summarize the data on the abundance of microplastics in the samples of water, sediment and biota collected from stormwater, stormwater catchment areas and stormwater discharging sites. There were significant methodological variations between the studies throughout the experimental procedures and different techniques including, sieving, digestion (chemical and enzyme), density separation and filtration were reported for microplastics extraction from sample matrix. A combination of visual sorting and spectroscopic approaches such as infrared and Raman was adopted to identify and study microplastic characteristics such as shape, size, color and polymer. The microplastic abundance in each sample matrix was different with relatively high concentrations of smaller size particles (10−500 μm), majorly fibrous shaped (51 %) and polymers of polypropylene (27 %) and polyethylene (26 %). Finally, we conclude by identifying analytical challenges and suggesting appropriate methods that can be implemented to enable effective monitoring and comparison of microplastic contamination in stormwater.     

基于拉曼光谱技术的海水微塑料快速识别技术研究

近年来由于塑料的大量使用和排放,这些塑料经环境作用破碎变成微塑料大量汇聚到海洋中,导致海洋中聚集大量微塑料。微塑料形状较小,难以识别其来源与种类。激光拉曼探测技术具有快速、无损、且各物质指纹峰明显易被精确识别等优点,近年来被广泛应用。本文基于拉曼光谱探测技术,提出了一种结合小波处理、随机森林算法实现海水中微塑料快速识别的智能分类方法。针对六种典型的海水微塑料标准样品（丙烯腈(A)-丁二烯(B)-苯乙烯(S)的三元共聚物（ABS）、聚酰胺（PA）、聚对苯二甲酸乙二醇酯（PET）、聚丙烯（PP）、聚苯乙烯（PS）、聚氯乙烯（PVC））,采用激光拉曼探测技术进行光谱数据收集,对获取的拉曼光谱采用小波基为DB7、分解次数为3的小波,标准差归一化进行了拉曼光谱预处理。为了提高识别速度,同时还需要对光谱数据进行数据压缩预处理,分别进行了数据压缩点为64,128,256,512和1 024点的数据压缩比较,它们的决策树算法识别精度分别为91.51%,91.67%,92.35%,93.17%和93.21%,随机森林算法识别精度分别为93.12%,93.92%,94.83%,96.81%和96.81%,实验结果表明,微塑料的拉曼光谱压缩为512点时为效率和精度的最佳压缩点,可以为实际工程应用中微塑料拉曼数据压缩提供参考。分别采用决策树、随机森林两种算法进行微塑料拉曼光谱识别研究。研究结果表明,基于拉曼光谱数据,随机森林算法的识别微塑料交叉验证精度高于决策树算法。为进一步提高识别精度,进行了模型参数（折次k）优化研究,采用经过优化后的模型参数（k=20）,随机森林算法识别微塑料的交叉验证精度可以达到97.24%。可以为实际海水中微塑料的快速识别提供技术参考。