The pervasive presence of nanoplastics (NPs) in environmental media has raised significant concerns regarding their implications for environmental safety and human health. However, owing to their tiny size and low level in the environment, there is still a lack of effective methods for measuring the amount of NPs. Leveraging the principles of Mie scattering, a novel approach for rapid quantitative detection of small NPs in low concentrations in water has been developed. A limit of detection of 4.2 μg/L for quantitative detection of polystyrene microspheres as small as 25 nm was achieved, and satisfactory recoveries and relative standard deviations were obtained. The results of three self-ground NPs showed that the method can quantitatively detect the concentration of NPs in a mixture of different particle sizes. The satisfactory recoveries (82.4% to 110.3%) of the self-ground NPs verified the good anti-interference ability of the method. The total concentrations of the NPs in the five brands of commercial bottled water were 0.07 to 0.39 μg/L, which were directly detected by the method. The proposed method presents a potential approach for conducting and real-time environmental risk assessments of NPs on human and ecosystem health in actual water environments.

中文翻译：

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原位快速检测水中微量纳米塑料的强大方法——米氏散射

环境介质中普遍存在的纳米塑料（NP）引起了人们对其对环境安全和人类健康影响的严重关注。然而，由于纳米粒子尺寸微小且在环境中含量较低，目前仍缺乏有效的方法来测量纳米粒子的含量。利用米氏散射原理，开发了一种快速定量检测水中低浓度小纳米颗粒的新方法。对小至25 nm的聚苯乙烯微球的定量检测达到了4.2 μg/L的检出限，并获得了满意的回收率和相对标准偏差。三种自磨纳米粒子的结果表明，该方法可以定量检测不同粒径混合物中纳米粒子的浓度。自研磨纳米颗粒的回收率令人满意（82.4%~110.3%），验证了该方法良好的抗干扰能力。该方法直接检测出5个品牌市售瓶装水中纳米颗粒的总浓度为0.07～0.39μg/L。该方法提出了一种在实际水环境中对纳米粒子对人类和生态系统健康进行实时环境风险评估的潜在方法。