Effects of microplastics and pollutants from agriculture activities, pharmaceuticals and personal care products – adsorption and toxicity

Microplastics (MPs) function as dynamic vectors for environmental contaminants, adsorbing pollutants from three principal categories: agricultural chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and personal care products (PCPs), and altering their persistence, mobility, and bioavailability across aquatic and terrestrial systems. This review critically synthesises adsorption mechanisms, toxicity pathways, and environmental implications across these pollutant categories within a unified framework, distinguishing carrier-mediated bioavailability enhancement from formally defined synergism - where combined toxicity exceeds additive predictions based on individual dose-response relationships - a distinction inconsistently applied in the existing literature. Key analytical findings indicate that hydrophobic partitioning dominates adsorption across non-polar polymers, that the Freundlich isotherm behaviour implies no effective saturation threshold under environmentally relevant concentrations, and that oxidative stress represents the most consistently documented toxicity endpoint across trophic levels. Detection methodologies, including FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, and ICP-MS, are critically evaluated alongside emerging AI-based identification approaches. Recent advances in MP removal, including bio-based hydrogels, aerogels, and polydopamine derivatives, are assessed under standardised experimental conditions to enable meaningful performance comparisons. This review integrates adsorption-bioavailability-toxicity interactions across pollutant classes, identifies methodological limitations, and proposes a prioritised research agenda to translate laboratory findings into robust environmental risk assessments.