Metal–Organic Frameworks for the Elimination of Microplastics from Water: A Review of Advances and Mechanisms

Microplastics (MPs), ubiquitous and persistent environmental pollutants, pose significant risks to ecosystems and human health. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as promising platforms for MPs treatment, leveraging their high surface areas, tunable pores, and rich active sites for adsorption and catalytic degradation. While studies on well-known MOFs, such as the Materials of Institut Lavoisier (MIL), University of Oslo-66 (UiO-66), and zeolitic imidazolate framework (ZIF) series, have demonstrated effective removal of common MPs like polystyrene, polyethylene, and polyethylene terephthalate, with composite strategies further enhancing performance, key challenges persist. These include a reliance on ideal laboratory conditions, insufficient evaluation of real-water interference, and hurdles in scalability, stability, and cost. This review systematically consolidates research progress from the past five years, with a distinct focus on comparatively analyzing treatment mechanisms. By reviewing 50 adsorption and 26 catalytic degradation studies, this review organize the findings according to material system, target plastic, interaction mechanism, and experimental conditions. This work not only synthesizes current achievements and bottlenecks but also provides a roadmap for the rational design of high-performance MOFs, aiming to bridging the gap between fundamental research and practical application.