This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/locate/withdrawalpolicy). This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief. Figure 6c is an EDX spectrum which has suspicious similarities to EDX spectra appearing in Environmental Research, 252 (2024) 118785, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2024.118785 (Fig. 6b)
Environmental Research, 242 (2024) 117761, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2023.117761 (Fig 4c)
Environmental Research, 251 (2024) 118728, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2024.118728 (Fig 5c). The corresponding author was contacted for comment about these concerns but was unable to provide a suitable explanation. Additionally, two images which are part of Figure 5 can be found publicly on ResearchGate: Figure 5a appeared in 2015 at https://www.researchgate.net/post/Can-somebody-help-me-with-the-interpretation-of-TEM-pictures-of-silver-nanoparticles and Figure 5d in 2016 at. https://www.researchgate.net/post/What-could-be-the-reason-of-different-shapes-of-particles-of-a-single-material-in-sample. One of the conditions of submission of a paper for publication is that authors declare explicitly that their work is original and has not appeared in a publication elsewhere. Re-use of any data should be appropriately cited. As such this article represents a severe abuse of the scientific publishing system. The scientific community takes a very strong view on this matter and apologies are offered to readers of the journal that this was not detected during the submission process. The Editors have therefore lost confidence in the reliability of the findings presented in this article as a whole and accordingly have decided that it should be retracted.