Nanoplastics in aquatic environments—Sources, sampling techniques, and identification methods

Since the industrial revolution, humans have extensively been contributing to the accumulation of rubble in marine and freshwater ecosystems. Because the buildup of trash in water bodies was previously considered miniscule owing to its capacity to drift away from vantage points, the growing impact of plastic pollutants has historically been neglected. Today, however, pollution of aquatic systems is recognized as one of the biggest environmental threats to our planet. Ever since the mass production of plastic material in the 1940s, plastic has been statistically the largest contributor to marine pollution (Ryan et al., 2009). Concerns have been raised about the ecotoxicology of not only the macroform of plastic but also more recently plastic degradation products, namely micro- and nanosized plastic particles. Anthropogenic particles are manufactured particles and particles produced by human activities. Microlitter consists of anthropogenic particles in the size range of 1 μm to 5 mm. Microplastics, a subcategory of microlitter, include particles between 1 and 1000 μm in size and have a chemical composition of synthetic polymers, semisynthetic or copolymers, including tire and road wear particles. Furthermore, another property of microplastics is that they are solid state and insoluble at 20°C (Hartmann et al., 2019). Nanoplastics are the same type of particles as microplastics but in smaller sizes, namely between 1 and 1000 nm. Engineered nanoparticles are commonly defined as nanosized particles with at least two dimensions below 100 nm (Klaine et al., 2008). This chapter highlights nanoplastics in the aquatic environment; sources, sampling methods, and analytical techniques to identify nanoplastic particles in the aquatic environment.