Transfer and Fate of Plastic Emissions

Today, plastics are an irreplaceable part of our daily life, and plastic emissions are found everywhere in the environment. Therefore, it is important to understand their transfer pathways and fate to mitigate their impacts in the environment. This chapter aims to present comprehensive knowledge on the transfer and fate of plastic emissions from the points of loss, which determines the possible pathways, to the environmental compartments. We consider three potential locations here: indoors in technosphere, and outdoors in technosphere and ecosphere, such as air, soil, and water. For losses in the technosphere, the pathways are wastewater and waste pathway, and plastics might be retained on the pathways. However, mismanagements here will lead to direct release into the environment. Similarly, losses in ecosphere lead to direct release into the environment, since there is no capture mechanism. Plastics being released into the environment can then accumulate, fragment, degrade, and be further transported within the respective compartments or redistributed to other compartments. Modeling the transfer and fate of the emissions is a valuable tool to estimate plastics’ behavior in the environment. The models are helpful to extrapolate the data to spatial and temporal domains, which are difficult to obtain experimentally. We present challenges to model the plastic emissions due to their particulate characteristics and their many different properties, which sometimes change with time and which form a multidimensional space of variables. Furthermore, existing modeling approaches are summarized, and references to example simulations developed for different environmental compartments are given.