Paper here: <a href="https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsaenm.4c00159" rel="nofollow">https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsaenm.4c00159</a><p>Interestingly, there were three chemical systems that worked:<p>> 1:2 tetrabutylammonium bromide ([N4444]Br):decanoic acid<p>> 1:2 tetraoctylammonium bromide ([N8888]Br):decanoic acid<p>> 1:1 thymol:menthol<p>Unfortunately, none of them are great, and this method is going to be quite limited unless better chemical agents are found. Treating even 0.05% of the ocean's surface water with tetrabutylammonium bromide would require a vast fraction of the world's annual bromine production. It would possibly even call for quantities of bromine that exceed the world's current supply. Besides, bromine leakage could be just as bad -- or worse -- than microplastic contamination, as bromine is biologically active in an obvious and straightforward way, whereas the biological effects of microplastics are still a matter of some debate.<p>And of course there's not nearly enough thymol or menthol...<p>So this is interesting for bottled water companies, but not (yet) as an environmental remediation method.
Tangentially related, I'd love to see some form of per product microplastic rating for food and drinks, similar to nutritional facts.<p>I am finding bread products are often wrapped in two layers of plastic.<p>That can't be good.
Can someone answer a dumb question for me: plastics are made from petroleum, a class of molecules that has been in the ground for hundreds of millions of years, but are bad because plastics take a long time to degrade?<p>I don't understand. The thing they are made from apparently takes hundreds of millions of years to degrade!<p>I must be missing something important.