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Review
. 2025 Apr 15:471:142784.
doi: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2025.142784. Epub 2025 Jan 5.

Discovery and solution for microplastics: New risk carriers in food

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Review

Discovery and solution for microplastics: New risk carriers in food

Qi Zhang et al. Food Chem. .

Abstract

Microplastics (MPs), as a kind of plastic particles with an equal volume size of less than 5 mm, similar to PM2.5 in the air, are causing severe contamination issues in food. Along with the food chain accumulation, they have been confirmed to appear in daily foods and cause serious health risks to the organisms. However, there were no unifying national and local policies on separating, extracting, and detecting MPs in food, which is an essential and imperative early-warning strategy. This review carefully and comprehensively summarized the validated contaminated food, physical and chemical characteristics, extraction methods, traditional and rapid detection techniques, as well as degradation methods of MPs. We thoroughly analyzed the differences among these traditional strategies, and innovatively generalized the existing rapid detection techniques for MPs. Finally, the shortcomings of existing research were discussed, and the possibility of novel rapid and intelligent detection techniques for MPs in food was proposed.

Keywords: Degradation methods; Detection technology; Food safety; Microplastics; Physical and chemical characteristics.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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