Submission Deadline: 28 February 2020 (closed)
Wan-Ting (Grace) Chen is an Assistant Professor of Plastics Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. Grace’s ongoing work focuses on valorization of plastic waste into useful products, including pristine polymers, fuels, specialty chemicals, and monomers.
Sheree Pagsuyoin
Sheree Pagsuyoin is an Assistant Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, USA. Her research interests are in the areas of emerging micropollutants' fate and transport, water treatment, and water resources management.
Onur Apul
Onur Apul is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UML. He has more than 10 years of research experience in environmental engineering field specifically focusing on novel physicochemical water treatment technologies.
Microplastic pollution stems from global plastic waste mismanagement.
Microplastics include degraded or mass-produced plastics less than 5 mm
in size. Due to this small size, the environmental fate and potential
ecological impacts of microplastics differ from general plastic wastes.
The biological toxicity of particles, their internal components, and
their surface changes all present opportunities for these particles to
adversely affect the environment around them (Reimonn et al., 2019).
In addition, microplastics may interact with other emerging pollutants
such as xenobiotics (e.g., persistent organic pollutants (POPs) and
perfluorooctanoic acid (PFAs)). The interaction between microplastic and
these emerging pollutants remains a critical knowledge gap that makes
mitigation solutions limited.
The overall goal of this special issue is to shed light in the area of
risk mitigation of microplastics by developing proper methods to
characterize microplastic pollution and their consequences on our health
and the environment . New knowledge reported in this special issue will
provide guidance for future risk mitigation of microplastics, as well
as the design of sensors to detect and prevent microplastic pollution in
aquatic environments. Through this special issue, we hope to 1) collect
and highlight the state-of-the-art of risk mitigation of microplastic,
2) explore and document their potential interactions with emerging
pollutants, and 3) evaluate lifecycle and risk assessment of
microplastics/xenobiotics in the environment.