Detecting microplastics in the environment

News-When plastic is broken down into micro- and nanoparticles, it poses an increasing problem not only for the oceans and their inhabitants, but also for lakes, rivers and soils. For a long time, it was barely possible to track these particles, which are as small as a few millionths of a millimetre in size. Denise Mitrano, a geochemist at ETH Zurich, has now succeeded in doing this: she has developed a method to track micro- and nanoplastics in water, soil and even organisms

Originally, Mitrano was not interested in plastics but in engineered metal nanoparticles, such as those found in textiles and cosmetics, as well as how natural metal nanoparticles behave in the environment. Her breakthrough idea was to transfer the methods used to measure such nano-metals to plastic particles. To this end, she developed a process for chemically adding metals to plastic particles. For this achievement, she was awarded this year’s Marie Heim-Vögtlin Prize by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

20.12.2021

Ref: www.bioplasticsmagazine.com

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