Microplastics are of major concerns for society and is currently in the focus of legislators and administrations. A small number of measures to reduce or remove primary sources of microplastics to the environment are currently coming into effect. At the moment, they have not yet tackled important topics such as food safety. However, recent developments such as the 2018 bill in California are requesting the analysis of microplastics in drinking water by standardized operational protocols. Administrations and analytical labs are facing an emerging field of methods for sampling, extraction, and analysis of microplastics, which complicate the establishment of standardized operational protocols. In this review, the state of the currently applied identification and quantification tools for microplastics are evaluated providing a harmonized guideline for future standardized operational protocols to cover these types of bills. The main focus is on the naked eye detection, general optical microscopy, the application of dye staining, flow cytometry, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FT-Ir) and microscopy, Raman spectroscopy and microscopy, thermal degradation by pyrolysis–gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (py-GC-MS) as well as thermo-extraction and desorption gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (TED-GC-MS). Additional techniques are highlighted as well as the combined application of the analytical techniques suggested. An outlook is given on the emerging aspect of nanoplastic analysis. In all cases, the methods were screened for limitations, field work abilities and, if possible, estimated costs and summarized into a recommendation for a workflow covering the demands of society, legislation, and administration in cost efficient but still detailed manner.

Cesium lead halide (CsPbX₃, X = Cl, Br, I) nanocrystals (NCs) offer exceptional optical properties for several potential applications but their implementation is hindered by a low chemical and structural stability and limited processability. In the present work, we developed a new method to efficiently coat CsPbX₃ NCs, which resulted in their increased chemical and optical stability as well as processability. The method is based on the incorporation of poly(maleic anhydride-alt-1-octadecene) (PMA) into the synthesis of the perovskite NCs. The presence of PMA in the ligand shell stabilizes the NCs by tightening the ligand binding, limiting in this way the NC surface interaction with the surrounding media. We further show that these NCs can be embedded in self-standing silicone/glass plates as down-conversion filters for the fabrication of monochromatic green and white light emitting diodes (LEDs) with narrow bandwidths and appealing color characteristics.

Transition metal phosphides have great potential to optimize a number of functionalities in several energy conversion and storage applications, particularly when nanostructured or in nanoparticle form. However, the synthesis of transition metal phosphide nanoparticles and its scalability is often limited by the toxicity, air sensitivity and high cost of the reagents used. We present here a simple, scalable and cost-effective ‘heating up’ procedure to produce metal phosphides using inexpensive, low-toxicity and air-stable triphenyl phosphite as source of phosphorous and chlorides as metal precursors. This procedure allows the synthesis of a variety of phosphide nanoparticles, including phosphides of Ni, Co and Cu. The use of carbonyl metal precursors further allowed the synthesis of Fe₂P and MoP nanoparticles. The fact that minor modifications in the experimental parameters allowed producing nanoparticles with different compositions and even to tune their size and shape, shows the high potential and versatility of the triphenyl phosphite precursor and the presented method. We also detail here a methodology to displace organic ligands from the surface of phosphide nanoparticles, which is a key step towards their application in energy conversion and storage systems.

AFM is a technique widely applied in the nanoscale characterisation of polymers and their surface properties. With nano-FTIR and IR-sSNOM imaging an optical dimension is added to this technique that allows for straightforward high resolution characterisation and spectroscopy of polymers. As the volume sampled by these near-field techniques depends mostly on the radius of the cantilever tip, typically 10 nm, it is orders of magnitude smaller than in conventional techniques. Nevertheless, comparability of nano-FTIR near-field spectra and data from macroscopic methods has been shown. Some relevant polymers such as polystyrene however, prove to be more difficult to detect than others. Furthermore, the small sampled volume suggests lower signal quality of nano-FTIR data and proof of its suitability for a reliable library search identification is lacking. To evaluate the techniques especially towards automatic and higher throughput identification of nanoscale polymers, for example in blends or environmental samples, we examined domain distributions in a PS-LDPE film and spectral responses of foils of the most relevant commercial polymers. We demonstrate the successful library search identification of all samples with nano-FTIR data measured in less than seven minutes per spectrum with a free IR spectra database in combination with established commercial OPUS 7.5 software and the recently released freeware siMPle. We discuss aspects affecting the accuracy of the identification for different polymers and show that the small spectral range of 1700–1300 cm⁻¹ already leads to similar success in differentiating between polymer types with near-field data as with conventional far-field FTIR spectroscopy. Even a polymer sample weathered in the environment can be identified without prior cleaning, proving wide fields of applications for characterisation and identification of diverse polymer samples. Finally, we propose measurement and analysis strategies for known and unknown samples with this novel technique.