Microplastics Fingerprinting team members release standard operating procedure for microplastic extraction from environmental samples

By Nancy Goucher

The Microplastics Fingerprinting project is working towards better understanding of microplastic pollution in the natural environment, including the quantities, particle sizes, and composition of plastics found in sediments, soils, and water. This work requires recovering microplastic particles from different types of environmental samples (i.e., matrices). However, there is an overall lack of standardization across the methods people use to do this extraction in a way that ensures results can be compared and quantified across projects. 

To address this challenge, members of the Microplastics Fingerprinting team worked collaboratively within their research group to develop a standard operating procedure (SOP) for separating microplastics (MPs) from different environmental sample types which included: sediment, soil, atmospheric deposition, and water samples. The SOP can guide those working with aqueous samples, such as atmospheric bulk deposition samples, and surface water grab samples. It also provides guidance for working with wet or dry sediment and soil samples. The SOP includes the following major steps:

• Spiking and preliminary separation
• Density separation
• Organic matter removal
• Manual counting
• Particle identification

Details can be found in the SOP document shared online on Zenodo.