Abstract
Since the plastic frenzy began during the last century, the contamination of air, water, soil, and biota with microplastics, the degraded metabolites of plastics, has become a subject of environmental research. Resolving the issue requires the tracking of microplastics back to their sources. Environmental forensic approaches have the potential to tackle this ubiquitous challenge, but their application faces serious hindrances. The questions concerned with the manifestation of the problem to the transport, eventual fate, and source identification are still to a large extent unanswered. These issues are faced due to the poor understanding of interconnectedness of environmental metrics and lack of standardized data. This review is conducted with the purpose of assessing potential routes of microplastics by understanding the sink-source identification techniques and to determine the effectiveness of different metrics for the study of microplastics and their application as a tool in environmental forensics and other relevant fields.
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Farooq, S., Qadir, A., Jameel, N. (2022). Evaluation of Different Metrics to Study Microplastics as an Environmental Forensic Tool. In: Hashmi, M.Z. (eds) Microplastic Pollution. Emerging Contaminants and Associated Treatment Technologies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89220-3_5
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