Plastics entering natural environments immediately begin to interact with their surroundings. Rather than remaining chemically and physically inert, their surfaces are continuously transformed through physical abrasion, UV radiation, hydrolysis, oxidation, biofilm formation, adsorption of natural organic matter, eco-corona formation, and the leaching of chemical additives. These processes fundamentally modify the pristine physicochemical properties of plastics, shifting their surface chemistry, roughness, density, and buoyancy, which in turn reshapes their biological interactions and ecological impacts.
Understanding these dynamic transformations is essential because they govern how plastics interact with minerals, organic matter, microorganisms and contaminants, ultimately influencing their transport, fragmentation, persistence and ecological impacts across environmental compartments. Despite rapid progress in recent years, many of these interface processes remain poorly constrained, particularly under environmentally realistic conditions and across long temporal scales.
This session aims to bring together researchers investigating the processes that shape the plastic-environment interface across terrestrial, freshwater, marine and atmospheric environments. We welcome conceptual, laboratory, field and modelling studies that improve our understanding of how environmental exposure alters plastic properties and how these changes affect the behaviour, transport, and fate of plastics in natural systems.
We particularly encourage contributions addressing:
- Physical weathering, fragmentation, abrasion, and surface roughening of plastics
- UV weathering, hydrolysis, oxidation and other chemical transformation processes
- Biofilm development, eco-corona formation and microbial colonisation
- Interactions between plastics and minerals, sediments, natural organic matter and contaminants
- Leaching, environmental release, and toxicity of chemical additives and degradation products
- Changes in plastic properties controlling transport, fragmentation, aggregation and environmental fate
- Laboratory, field and modelling studies investigating environmentally realistic plastic alterations.
- Analytical approaches for characterising surface alteration and plastic-environment interactions
- Transport at the interface of different environmental compartments