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ISO 5667-27:2025 Is Not Directly Applicable to Intact-Liquid Field Measurement (EcoExposureTM): The Role of Filtration for Laboratory-Sampling in Microplastics / Nanoplastics Analysis
Summary
A new technical note clarifies that a recently updated international standard for testing water for microplastics (tiny plastic particles) doesn't apply to newer field-testing devices, like EcoExposure™ Water, that measure plastic particles right on the spot instead of filtering samples and sending them to a lab. This matters because as portable microplastics-testing tools become more common, we need clear rules about which methods they should follow, otherwise results from different tools might not be comparable, making it harder to know how much plastic contamination is actually in our water and what that means for our health.
ISO 5667-27:2025 provides guidance for sampling suspended microplastics in water using approaches including grab sampling, cascade filtration, and net sampling. Importantly, the standard addresses sample collection rather than analytical measurement and does not establish methods for chemical analysis, physical characterization, digestion, or other downstream analytical procedures. The sampling architecture described in ISO 5667-27:2025 is principally relevant to workflows in which collected water or concentrated particulate material subsequently undergoes transportation, storage, preparation, and laboratory analysis. Filtration, cascade filtration, and net sampling are useful in this context because they facilitate particle collection, concentration, size fractionation, or recovery for downstream laboratory instrumentation. This architecture differs fundamentally from an intact-liquid field measurement platform in which the primary analytical measurement occurs directly at or near the point of sample collection. EcoExposure™ Water is being developed under this latter architecture. This technical note explains why ISO 5667-27:2025 is therefore not directly applicable as the primary sampling workflow for EcoExposure™, while remaining relevant to complementary laboratory analyses that require particle collection or concentration.