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Spring 2024

Elnaz Kalantar

Concerns are growing about plastics in the environment. The aging of the plastics in the environment will impact their fate and their interactions with the ecosystems’ constituents. As such, there is a need to improve our understanding of aged plastics and how they differ from their pristine or...

2024-04-22

Wolfe, Amber

Plastic products have become a necessary part of our day-to-day lives. They are useful because they are incredibly stable and durable, but what are the consequences? Nanoplastics are small pieces of plastic, from 1000 nm to 1 nm, that are either formed in factories or from the degradation of...

Fall 2023

Nurain, Afrida

Nanoplastics are plastic fragments less than 1000 nm and are a growing concern within the plastic pollution crisis. They have distinct properties that differ from bulk plastics because of their size, large surface area-to-volume ratio, and their potential to disrupt biological processes once...

Spring 2023

Robinson, Abigail SR

As of 2016, the global annual production of plastic was 330 million metric tonnes (Plastics Europe, 2017). This staggering number is expected to double over the next 20 years as consumption increases (Plastics Europe, 2017; Lebreton et al., 2019). Less than half of the plastic produced reaches a...

Fall 2021

Yueyang Zhang

Nanomaterials (NMs) are materials that are between 1 and 100 nm at least one dimension. While natural processes (volcanos, lightning, erosion, etc.) have been producing NMs for the entirety of the earth’s existence, recent advances in material sciences have produced novel engineered NMs...