Drinks including water, soda, beer and wine sold in glass bottles contain more microplastics than those in plastic bottles, according to a surprising study released by France's food safety agency Friday.
Nice! After doing some research it seems the general consensus is that LDIR is better for detecting and distinguishing plastics, but only detects down to a radius of ~5um. In this paper they opted to use py-GC/MS in order to document smaller particles.
The problem with pyrolysis however is that by busting everything up it’s more likely that polyethylene can be confused with other hydrocarbons. In the paper it seems their only confirmation is that the data matches up with other labs that have run the same py-GC/MS tests. The paper also mentioned someone using electron microscopy to see microplastics in brain tissue, describing them as “nanoscale shard-like fragments.” However there’s no source for it and I can’t find it.
I did find this article comparing microplastic detection methods I thought was pretty interesting. A few years old tho.
The data is from this paper - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03453-1
Nice! After doing some research it seems the general consensus is that LDIR is better for detecting and distinguishing plastics, but only detects down to a radius of ~5um. In this paper they opted to use py-GC/MS in order to document smaller particles.
The problem with pyrolysis however is that by busting everything up it’s more likely that polyethylene can be confused with other hydrocarbons. In the paper it seems their only confirmation is that the data matches up with other labs that have run the same py-GC/MS tests. The paper also mentioned someone using electron microscopy to see microplastics in brain tissue, describing them as “nanoscale shard-like fragments.” However there’s no source for it and I can’t find it.
I did find this article comparing microplastic detection methods I thought was pretty interesting. A few years old tho.