UV-driven fragmentation of plastics in an aquatic environment: laboratory studies

Plastic is considered one of the most practical inventions of the 20^th century, providing us with a range of very practical materials. However, due to mismanaged waste the plastic pollution has become persistent in aquatic environments. As the plastic products undergo environmental weathering once released in the aquatic environment, they degrade and are fragmented into a highly heterogeneous group of particles with different sizes (i.e., from centimeter over millimeter and micrometer to nanometer scale), shapes, densities, and chemical compositions. However, due to the lack of suitable analytical methodology, knowledge on degradation and/or fragmentation of plastics to nanoplastics (NPs, 1-1000nm), especially in the aquatic environments is still largely lacking.

In the framework of the MS4Plastics project, 15 different plastic materials, including a surgical face mask, different polymer pellets, rubber dust, and plastic powders as common examples of plastics expected to be present in the aquatic system were added to  Milli Q water and exposed to UV-light for 120 hours to better understand plastic degradation and/or fragmentation into NPs. Finally, for detection and size determination of NPs formed after accelerated UV-driven plastic fragmentation in water, dynamic light scattering was used. For a fraction of the samples, asymmetric flow field-flow fractionation (AF4) hyphenated to multi-angle light scattering (MALS) was used as a complementary analytical technique for characterization of NPs.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101023205.