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ISO 16094-2:2025 Is Not Directly Applicable to Intact-Liquid Microplastic/Nanoplastic Field Measurement (EcoExposure™): Scope of Vibrational Spectroscopy Laboratory Methods for Clean Waters
Summary
A new international standard for testing microplastics in drinking water only covers one specific lab method (using microscopes plus light-based chemical analysis) and only detects particles roughly 1 micrometer or larger, meaning it misses smaller nanoplastics that may be more easily absorbed by the body. This matters because it shows there's still no single "gold standard" test that captures the full picture of plastic contamination in water, so consumers should be cautious about assuming any one test result tells the whole story of their exposure.
ISO 16094-2:2025 establishes principles for analyzing microplastics in drinking water and other low-suspended-solids waters using microscopy coupled with vibrational spectroscopy, principally FTIR and Raman. The standard addresses particle sizing, counting, and polymer identification within an approximately 1–5,000 µm range and therefore represents a specific particle-resolved laboratory analytical architecture rather than a universal framework for plastic measurement. Its scope does not encompass much of the nanoplastic size regime or intact-liquid field measurement, in which the primary analysis occurs at or near the point of collection. EcoExposure™ Water is being developed under this latter architecture for total plastic burden, including microplastics, nanoplastics, and mixed MP+NP samples. Development testing has included drinking water across multiple countries and diverse marine, river, DOM-rich, and mineral-rich matrices, as well as progressive-filtration studies demonstrating distinguishable optical behavior among visually similar drinking-water samples. This technical note explains why ISO 16094-2:2025 is not directly applicable as the primary analytical standard for EcoExposure™, while remaining relevant to complementary particle-resolved laboratory characterization using FTIR and Raman spectroscopy. Figure 1. ISO 16094-2:2025 Covers One Branch of the Broader Microplastics Lab-Based Analytical Landscape The standard applies principally to particle-resolved FTIR and Raman vibrational spectroscopy, while other widely used research laboratory approaches—including Py-GC/MS, TED-GC/MS, fluorescence microscopy, and electron microscopy—operate under different analytical principles and fall outside its scope. These methods can measure fundamentally different endpoints, including particle number, size, polymer identity, morphology, or polymer mass, and report results in non-interchangeable units. Thus, ISO 16094-2:2025 does not establish a universal laboratory method for microplastics analysis, and no single laboratory technique currently serves as a comprehensive reference standard across the field.