Environmental hazard of polypropylene microplastics from disposable medical masks: acute toxicity towards Daphnia magna and current knowledge on other polypropylene microplastics.

ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the use of disposable plastics, including medical masks, which have become a necessity in our daily lives. As these are often improperly disposed of, they represent an important potential source of microplastics in the environment. We prepared microplastics from polypropylene medical masks and characterised their size, shape, organic chemical leaching, and acute toxicity to the planktonic crustacean Daphnia magna. The three layers of the masks were separately milled and characterised. Each of the inner frontal, middle filtering, and outer layers yielded different types of microplastics: fibres were obtained from the inner and outer layer, but irregular fragments from the middle layer. The shape of the obtained microplastics differed from the initi

SUBMITTER: Jemec Kokalj A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8724753 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature