Abstract
Research on the distribution and effects of particulate plastic has intensified in recent years and yet, due to analytical challenges, our understanding of nanoplastic occurrence and behaviour has remained comparatively elusive. However, process studies could greatly aid in defining key parameters for nanoplastic interactions within and transfers between technical and environmental compartments. Here we provide a method to synthesize nanoplastic particles doped with a chemically entrapped metal used as a tracer, which provides a robust way to detect nanoplastics more easily, accurately and quantitatively in complex media. We show the utility of this approach in batch studies that simulate the activated sludge process of a municipal waste water treatment plant and so better understand the fate of nanoplastics in urban environments. We found that the majority of particles were associated with the sludge (>98%), with an average recovery of over 93% of the spiked material achieved. We believe that this approach can be developed further to study the fate, transport, mechanistic behaviour and biological uptake of nanoplastics in a variety of systems on different scales.
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The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request
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Acknowledgements
We thank R. Kägi and M. Surette for providing discussions and feedback, M. Morbidelli for access to the equipment to synthesize the particles, G. Storti for discussions, L. Jin for the preliminary particle synthesis and H. Wu for facilitating this collaboration.
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D.M.M. conceived of the study, conducted the particle synthesis and characterization and the WWTP batch experiments, wrote the manuscript and led the research team. A.B. synthesized the nanoplastics and contributed to the manuscript writing. S.F. performed WWTP batch studies and contributed to the manuscript writing. M.S. assisted in the study design. A.C. was involved in the particle synthesis and contributed to writing the manuscript. F.S. performed the early fundamental tests for the experimental work. All the authors have given approval to the final version of the manuscript.
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Mitrano, D.M., Beltzung, A., Frehland, S. et al. Synthesis of metal-doped nanoplastics and their utility to investigate fate and behaviour in complex environmental systems. Nat. Nanotechnol. 14, 362–368 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0360-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-018-0360-3
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