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What Goes Around Should Not Move Around: Immobilizing Microplastics as a New Approach for Analytical Ring Trials
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By immobilizing microplastic particles onto silicon filters, researchers created stable reference samples that multiple laboratories can measure sequentially rather than each lab analyzing its own separate subsample. This serial design reduced measurement variability by 77% compared to the usual parallel testing approach. Standardized reference materials are essential for making microplastic measurements from different labs comparable — a critical step for developing reliable environmental regulations and safety thresholds.
Microplastics have gained importance as pervasive environmental particulate pollutants. Their analysis demands precise quantification methods, with interlaboratory comparisons (ILCs) being crucial for performance assessment. Typically, ILCs follow a parallel design: participants each analyze their own sample specimen, often with significant variability due to challenges in producing identical subsamples of the particulate analyte, inseparably masking the relevant uncertainty sources the ILC intends to measure. We provide a filtration-immobilization approach for particles ≤100 μm, creating permanently immobilized microplastics samples. This enables serial ILC designs where participants sequentially measure the same sample. Demonstrating the concept using 5 polymers immobilized on 10 μm pore-sized silicon filters, we expose the specific measurement uncertainty being 77% lower than the total combined uncertainty observed in a parallel ILC (relative standard deviations: 5 and 23%, respectively). Particle immobilization opens further applications in sample archiving and creation of durable reference samples also for other fields of particulate matter research beyond microplastics.
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