Abstract
Plastic pollution is defined as ubiquitous in the aquatic environment which has induced a strong research effort the past decade notably on methods development to analyse items within the size range smaller than 5mm known as microplastics (MPs). However, small microplastic (< 10 µm) and nanoplastics (NPs; < 1 µm) which are also found in the environment are less investigated notably because of sampling and analytical limitations. It thus induced a knowledge gap in the plastic research as well to assess their concentration and distribution in the environment as to describe their effect in the estuarine and marine ecosystems. Nevertheless, this lack of relevant and standardized method(s) determination is associated to a difficulty to build environmental risk assessment. The main objectives of this project is to develop an innovative methodological strategies toolbox for small MPs and NPs analysis in complex environmental matrices including information on physical and chemical characteristics as well as their fate in the environment such as aggregation features, degradation kinetics and additives release kinetics that might be thus integrated in a biochemodynamical model to increase knowledge on plastic particles with size < 10 µm.
Researcher(s)
Research team(s)
Project type(s)