Global Centre for Environmental Remediation (GCER), University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, 2308, Australia; Cooperative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment (CRC CARE), University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, 2308, Australia.
Global Centre for Environmental Remediation (GCER), University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, 2308, Australia; Cooperative Research Centre for Contamination Assessment and Remediation of the Environment (CRC CARE), University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW, 2308, Australia.
Chemosphere. 2021 Oct;281:130864. doi: 10.1016/j.chemosphere.2021.130864. Epub 2021 May 13.
Microplastics are among the ubiquitous contaminants in our environment. As emerging contaminants, microplastics are still facing with lots of challenges on the characterisation, including their capture, identification and visualisation, particularly from a complex background. For example, when we print documents using a laser printer, we are printing microplastics onto paper, because the plastics are the main ingredient of the toner powder mixture. Characterisation of these microplastic mixture meets an even more complicated challenge, because plastic's signals might be shielded by other toner powder ingredients such as the pigments, the dyes, the black carbon, and the paper fabrics as well. To solve this challenge, we employ various techniques, including SEM, TEM, XPS, FT-IR, TGA and Raman, to characterise the microplastics printed via the toner powders. Interestingly, we show that Raman can distinguish and visualise the distribution of the microplastics from the complex background of the mixture. We estimate the millions of toner powders, each of which is ~4-6 μm in size, are printed out per A4 sheet as microplastics. The findings send a strong warning that millions of microplastics might be generated from the printing activities in our daily lives.
微塑料是我们环境中无处不在的污染物之一。作为新兴污染物，微塑料在特性描述方面仍然面临着许多挑战，包括其捕获、识别和可视化，特别是在复杂背景下。例如，当我们使用激光打印机打印文件时，我们会将微塑料打印到纸上，因为塑料是墨粉混合物的主要成分。这些微塑料混合物的特性描述面临着更加复杂的挑战，因为塑料的信号可能会被其他墨粉成分屏蔽，如颜料、染料、黑碳和纸张纤维等。为了解决这个挑战，我们采用了各种技术，包括 SEM、TEM、XPS、FT-IR、TGA 和 Raman，来对通过墨粉打印的微塑料进行特性描述。有趣的是，我们表明 Raman 可以区分和可视化混合物中微塑料的分布。我们估计，每一张 A4 纸上打印出的数百万个墨粉颗粒，每个颗粒的大小约为 4-6μm，都会成为微塑料。这一发现发出了强烈的警告，即我们日常生活中的打印活动可能会产生数百万的微塑料。
