From its early beginnings in characterizing aerosol particles to its recent applications for investigating natural waters and waste streams, single particle inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (spICP-MS) has proven to be a powerful technique for the detection and characterization of aqueous dispersions of metal-containing nanomaterials. Combining the high-throughput of an ensemble technique with the specificity of a single particle counting technique and the elemental specificity of ICP-MS, spICP-MS is capable of rapidly providing researchers with information pertaining to size, size distribution, particle number concentration, and major elemental composition with minimal sample perturbation. Recently, advances in data acquisition, signal processing, and the implementation of alternative mass analyzers (e.g., time-of-flight) has resulted in a wider breadth of particle analyses and made significant progress toward overcoming many of the challenges in the quantitative analysis of nanoparticles. This review provides an overview of spICP-MS development from a niche technique to application for routine analysis, a discussion of the key issues for quantitative analysis, and examples of its further advancement for analysis of increasingly complex environmental and biological samples. Graphical Abstract Single particle ICP-MS workflow for the analysis of suspended nanoparticles.

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For textiles containing nanosilver, we assessed benefit (antimicrobial efficacy) in parallel with potential to release nanosilver (impact) during multiple life cycle stages. The silver loading and method of silver attachment to the textile highly influenced the silver release during washing. Multiple sequential simulated household washing experiments for fabric swatches in deionized water with or without detergent showed a range of silver release. The toxicity of washing experiment supernatants to zebrafish (Danio rerio) embryos was negligible, with the exception of the very highest Ag releases (∼1 mg/L Ag). In fact, toxicity tests indicated that residual detergent exhibited greater adverse response than the released silver. Although washing the fabrics did release silver, it did not affect their antimicrobial efficacy, as demonstrated by >99.9% inhibition of E. coli growth on the textiles, even for textiles that retained as little as 2 μg/g Ag after washing. This suggests that very little nanosilver is required to control bacterial growth in textiles. Visible light irradiation of the fabrics reduced the extent of Ag release for textiles during subsequent washings. End-of-life experiments using simulated landfill conditions showed that silver remaining on the textile is likely to continue leaching from textiles after disposal in a landfill.

Composite particles containing metallic nanoparticles in a polymer matrix, which simulate environmentally-transformed nanoparticles, are effectively characterized by combining field-flow fractionation with single particle ICP-MS.