Interaction mechanism of triclosan on pristine microplastics

Urban wastewaters comprise different hydrophobic pollutants such as microplastics (MPs), pharmaceuticals, and personal care products. Among these pollutants, triclosan (TCS) shows a worrying interaction ability with MPs; recent studies show MPs serve as a vector between TCS and aquatic environments, whose interaction is still being studied to understand their combined toxicity and transport ability. Using computational chemistry tools, this work evaluates the TCS-MPs interaction mechanism, including pristine polymers, i.e., aliphatic polyamides (PA), polyethylene (PE), polystyrene (PS), polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and polyethylene terephthalate (PET). Our results show that TCS adsorption on MPs solely occurs via physisorption, where PA reaches the higher adsorption ability. Remarkably, MPs reach higher or comparable adsorption stability than carbon-based materials, boron nitrides, and minerals, indicating their worrying transport properties. Also, the adsorption capacity is strongly influenced by entropy changes rather than thermal effects, which determine the different sorption capacities among polymers and agree well with reported sorption capacities from adsorption kinetic experiments in the literature. MPs show a polar and highly susceptible surface to establish electrostatics and dispersion effects on TCS. Accordingly, the TCS-MPs interaction mechanism arises from the interplay between electrostatics and dispersion forces, with a combined contribution of 81–93 %. Specifically, PA and PET maximize the electrostatic effects, while PE, PP, PVC, and PS maximize the dispersion effects. From the chemical viewpoint, TCS-MPs complexes interact by a series of pairwise interactions such as Van der Waals, hydrogen bonding, C-H⋯π, C-H⋯C-H, C-Cl⋯C-H, and C-Cl⋯Cl-C. Finally, the mechanistic information explains the effects of temperature, pressure, aging, pH, and salinity on TCS adsorption. This study quantitatively elucidates the interaction mechanism of TCS-MP systems, which were hard to quantify to date, and explains the TCS-MPs sorption performance for sorption/kinetic studies.