ペットボトルの水に何が含まれているのか?数十万個の小さなプラスチック片が存在する可能性を示唆する研究結果(What’s in Your Bottled Water? Study Suggests There May Be Hundreds of Thousands of Tiny Plastic Bits)

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2024-01-08 ラトガース大学

◆ラトガースヘルスとコロンビア大学の研究チームが開発した画期的な微小なプラスチック粒子を検出できる技術が、ボトル入り水の中に存在するこれらの微粒子が人間の血液、細胞、胎盤に影響を及ぼす未知の健康効果できる可能性があるとされています。
◆研究では、平均して1リットルの水に約240,000個の検出可能なプラスチックの破片が含まれていることが明らかになりました。これは、主に大きなプラスチックのサイズに基づく以前の推定よりも10〜100倍多い量です。
◆研究者は、新しい研究において、ハイパースペクトル誘導ラマン散乱(SRS)顕微鏡法を使用し、7種類の一般的なプラスチックに対して詳細な分析を行いました。これにより、微細なナノプラスチックも検出でき、同時にそれらのポリマータイプも同定できる画期的な手法として注目されています。

<関連情報>

SRS顕微鏡によるナノプラスチックの迅速な単一粒子化学イメージング Rapid single-particle chemical imaging of nanoplastics by SRS microscopy

Naixin Qian, Xin Gao, Xiaoqi Lang, +5, and Wei Min
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  Published:January 8, 2024
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2300582121

ペットボトルの水に何が含まれているのか?数十万個の小さなプラスチック片が存在する可能性を示唆する研究結果(What’s in Your Bottled Water? Study Suggests There May Be Hundreds of Thousands of Tiny Plastic Bits)

Significance

Micro-nano plastics originating from the prevalent usage of plastics have raised increasingly alarming concerns worldwide. However, there remains a fundamental knowledge gap in nanoplastics because of the lack of effective analytical techniques. This study developed a powerful optical imaging technique for rapid analysis of nanoplastics with unprecedented sensitivity and specificity. As a demonstration, micro-nano plastics in bottled water are analyzed with multidimensional profiling of individual plastic particles. Quantification suggests more than 105 particles in each liter of bottled water, the majority of which are nanoplastics. This study holds the promise to bridge the knowledge gap on plastic pollution at the nano level.

Abstract

Plastics are now omnipresent in our daily lives. The existence of microplastics (1 µm to 5 mm in length) and possibly even nanoplastics (<1 μm) has recently raised health concerns. In particular, nanoplastics are believed to be more toxic since their smaller size renders them much more amenable, compared to microplastics, to enter the human body. However, detecting nanoplastics imposes tremendous analytical challenges on both the nano-level sensitivity and the plastic-identifying specificity, leading to a knowledge gap in this mysterious nanoworld surrounding us. To address these challenges, we developed a hyperspectral stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) imaging platform with an automated plastic identification algorithm that allows micro-nano plastic analysis at the single-particle level with high chemical specificity and throughput. We first validated the sensitivity enhancement of the narrow band of SRS to enable high-speed single nanoplastic detection below 100 nm. We then devised a data-driven spectral matching algorithm to address spectral identification challenges imposed by sensitive narrow-band hyperspectral imaging and achieve robust determination of common plastic polymers. With the established technique, we studied the micro-nano plastics from bottled water as a model system. We successfully detected and identified nanoplastics from major plastic types. Micro-nano plastics concentrations were estimated to be about 2.4 ± 1.3 × 105 particles per liter of bottled water, about 90% of which are nanoplastics. This is orders of magnitude more than the microplastic abundance reported previously in bottled water. High-throughput single-particle counting revealed extraordinary particle heterogeneity and nonorthogonality between plastic composition and morphologies; the resulting multidimensional profiling sheds light on the science of nanoplastics.

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