Microplastic pollution entering our environment at an increasing rate is a major problem in especially the aquatic environment where it cause health issues and mortality to living creatures. Microplastic particles (µPp) are omnipresent found in even the most remote corners of our planet such as the deep sea, they have been reported in human food and raise now concerns to human health. Plastic materials are persistent and degrade over hundreds or thousands of year while at the same time eroding in the environment to smaller µPp (size &gt;1µm) and nanoplastic particles (nPp, size &lt;1µm). To date there are no means to recover nPp or the smaller regime µPp from the environment for quantitation or qualitative analysis as the proposed methods for µPp recovery are based on different filtration and elutriation techniques suited only for the larger regime of the µPp, namely 50µm and above.<br/>Due to limited methods for nPp and smallest µPp extraction very little is known about their abundance in the environment. Studies showing nPp accumulation in aquatic organisms have been done and clearly show their presence in the environment. By using synthetic plastic particles of size below 1µm, it has also been shown, that the nPp accumulate and effect drastically the quality of life and health of several aquatic organisms.  Our work tackles the problem of capturing the µPp smaller than 50µm and offers a promising material for their capturing for research purposes as well as at the site of production to mitigate their release to the environment.<br/>In this study, we show that an extremely hygroscopic and amphiphilic large surface area nanomaterial, cellulose nanofibrils (CNF), in different formulations acts as an ideal capturing element for colloidal regime nano- and microplastics. Due to hygroscopic, amphiphilic nature of cellulose driving water diffusion induced capillary forces in the network and cohesion and large surface area of nanocellulose enhancing the cohesion with the particles, CNF captures efficiently the colloidal regime particles. We use fluorescence techniques to verify and quantify capturing of µPp and nPp from flowing and still media, and we study the capturing mechanisms by using a surface sensitive methods, QCM-D. Using SEM we image the surfaces and quantify the particle amounts after adsorption.

Capturing nano- and microplastics with nanocellulose networks

Macromolecular Chemistry: The Second Century

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ACS Spring 2020 National Meeting & Expo

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.