Quantification of microplastic mass and removal rates at wastewater treatment plants applying Focal Plane Array (FPA)-based Fourier Transform Infrared (FT-IR) imaging.

By Márta Simon, Nikki van Alst, J. Vollertsen. Water Research, 2018

719 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper presents a method for microplastic (MP) mass quantification using a Focal Plane Array-based Fourier Transform Infrared imaging technique. It discusses the issue that particle number is not a conserved base quantity and hence less suited than mass to compare independent studies on MP in the environment. It concludes that MP mass should be included when quantifying MP pollution in the environment, supplementing the conventional approach of reporting particle numbers. Applying mass as the unit of MP measurement, the paper presents data showing that Danish wastewater treatment plants discharge around 3 t/year of MP in the size range 10-500 μm. This value corresponds to an annual per capita emission from these plants of 0.56 g MP/(capita year). The distribution of polymer types by mass and particle number differed because the size of MP particles of the different material types varied.

Subfields: Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Pollution

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f60136336ca96ea41c089fc9b9e46bd1c6538592

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Citations in the corpus

Microplastics in freshwaters and drinking water: Critical review and assessment of data quality (2019, background): “by using a cooling or ice bath (Simon et al., 2018), however sometimes higher temperatures up to 75 C (Anderson et al.”
Simulating human exposure to indoor airborne microplastics using a Breathing Thermal Manikin (2019, methodology): “Following previous studies 33,47 , the increment of the bins was chosen to 0.1 on a logarithmic scale.”
Contributions of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy in microplastic pollution research: A review (2020, methodology): “…et al., 2017; Liu, Olesen, et al., 2019; Mintenig et al., 2017; Olesen et al., 2019; Primpke et al., 2017, 2018, 2019; Primpke, Cross, et al., 2020; Simon et al., 2018; Vianello et al., 2019; Zarfl, 2019). m-FTIR technique is extensively used for chemical imaging (Table 5) of different…”