Microplastics Are Chemically Active, and Could Cause Biological Harm. Really!

More alarmism and hysteria regarding plastics! The first plastic was invented in 1897! If plastic was so dangerous, we should be all dead by now!

Alert: Plastophobia is a serious disorder. Please seek immediate medical help! (Caution: satire)

"Plastics are supposed to be chemically inert. It’s the reason they’re used so frequently to package food, bottle water, and create children’s toys: They’re safe. But something important happens when a large piece of plastic fragments into micro- and nanoparticles. Its surface area increases dramatically relative to its volume. Vastly more of the material is now exposed to its surroundings. A new study by researchers from Columbia University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that this newly created surface is not necessarily safe [???], and identified the chemical reasons why. ..."

From the abstract:

"Plastics have become an integral part of our modern society, largely because they are generally regarded as chemically inert under normal circumstances.

However, plastics fragmented into microplastics (less than 5 mm in size) have recently raised significant public concerns, and have been detected widely across ecosystems and human tissues with increasing environmental and health risks.

Here we show that commodity microplastics exhibit intrinsic physicochemical activity in water, manifested by the spontaneous generation of reactive oxygen species that increases with interfacial hydrophobicity and strongly correlates with interfacial electrostatics. Ab initio calculations support these observations and reveal that hydroxide oxidation becomes energetically more favourable at increasingly hydrophobic microplastic–water interfaces through the combined effects of partial solvation and electrostatics.

These interfacial properties and the resulting oxidative chemistry have direct implications for biomolecular adsorption, protein aggregation, and even cellular damage.

Together, our findings challenge the prevailing paradigm of plastic inertness, identify a possibly overlooked mechanism for the detrimental effects of microplastics on health and the environment, and contribute to a fundamental understanding of the structure–activity relationship of interfacial water, which may inform the design of safer and more sustainable plastic materials."

Microplastics Are Chemically Active, and Could Cause Biological Harm | Columbia News "A new study found that when microplastics contact water, their surfaces can become chemically reactive; it could be how they get us sick."

Intrinsic physicochemical activity at microplastic–water interfaces (open access)

Fig. 1: Spontaneous radical generation and surface electrostatics at PS microplastic–water interfaces.

The following figure looks really scary! 😊

Fig. 2: General chemical activity at microparticle–water interfaces across commodity plastics.