Collaborative Research: CAS-MNP: Radical-induced Weathering of Micro- and Nanoplastics in Water: Impacts on Suspensions, Agglomerations, and Contaminant Adsorptions

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This award from the Environmental Chemical Sciences Program in the Division of Chemistry supports Professors Julie Peller at Valparaiso University and Stephen Mezyk at California State University-Long Beach and their students. This project is exploring the formation and aging of small plastics pieces that are being created from plastic items in the environment. The world is currently being challenged with the problem of massive plastic waste pollution, especially in water environments. Plastic pieces that are very small, known as microplastics and nanoplastics, are extremely widespread and mostly not visible by the human eye. These plastic particles, which are stable for decades in water, are now being shown to negatively impact human health and ecosystems. The reactivity and behavior of these small plastic particles will be determined in the laboratory under various conditions that represent real world environments. The researchers and their undergraduate and MS students will take advantage of ionizing radiation sources to accelerate chemical and physical changes that happen to these small plastics in the environment over a longer period of time. Undergraduate students from the Hispanic Serving Institution (California State University Long Beach, CSULB) and Valparaiso University (VU) will participate in the research and share the data through conference/media venues related to environmental and public health. Minority high school students will take part in the VU summer research. These research findings will be integrated into courses at both universities, including a CSULB MS course on kinetics that now includes environmental pollution and VU chemistry laboratory experiments.A recent determination for the facile formation of small polyethylene microplastics and nanoplastics in water will be utilized to study the properties and reactivities of multiple plastic polymers as aqueous suspensions or solutions. Ionizing radiation techniques will be used to study the radical reactions that simulate the real-world chemical changes of nanoplastics, and to create various levels of weathered nanoplastics. The chemical and physical changes of these weathered species will be probed in the presence of other common dissolved substances and under different conditions. These experiments are expected to generate information on the detection, long-term changes and potential remediation of small micro and nanoplastics in aqueous systems.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.