Investigating the environmental fate of microplastics

Plastics have become indispensable in our daily life as they are inevitable in an exceptional amount of goods and the global plastic waste production has been predicted to triple to nearly 270 million tons from 2015 to 2060. Plastics have many positive benefits for society, but their everyday use, poor waste management and environmental persistence resulted in widespread pollution of the environment by plastic litter. Although plastics are considered non-biodegradable in the environment, they are affected by various biotic and abiotic processes that cause plastic fragmentation resulting in microplastics (MPs). Since MPs originate from various sources, they are also very diverse. They can be made of different polymers, they differ in size and shape and their properties change with time due to the biotic and abiotic processes during their life time in the environment. Consequently, the detection and identification of the complex mixture of environmentally relevant MPs in biotic samples is currently one of the biggest challenges of microplastic research. The main aim of the project is to implement novel methodologies into conventional microplastic research. We intend to implement state-of-the-art techniques, that will allow a complete characterization (spatially-resolved visualisation and identification of their composition) of environmentally relevant MPs, namely laser-based spectroscopy (elemental and chemical imaging) and X-ray computed tomography (structure visualisation). In this project, the novel methodology will be used for i) characterisation of changes of MPs properties during biotic and abiotic aging and ii) monitoring of aged MPs in an aquatic organism and estimation of potential changes on tissue level by the presence of these MPs.