Emerging pollutants in water: innovative approaches of study and treatment

Water quality is one of the major challenges that human-ity has to face. Tackling the problem of pollution needs the use of all the resources and expertise available to fill the lack of knowledge and technology. Concern is grow-ing over the many emerging contaminants, including heavy metals ions and plastics, which are omnipresent and poorly managed. In this contest, the presence of micro- and nanoplastics in the marine environment is raising strong concerns. The lack of appropriate methodologies to collect the nanoplastics from water systems imposes the use of engi-neered model nanoparticles to explore their main charac-teristics and behaviour. In order to develop a nanoplastic model more reliable and realistic compared to the com-mon polystyrene nanospheres, in this thesis, laser abla-tion has been applied to induce the formation of plastic nanoparticles in water starting from a bulk polymer film. The process was performed on Polyethylene Tereph-thalate, a commercial polymer used to produce beverage bottles, widespread in the environment. PET nanoparti-cles with an average size