Sampling and Processing of Microplastics from Water

Microplastics (MPs) are emergent pollutants in the terrestrial and aquatic environments. More than 600 species, as well as in drinking water have been observed to have MPs. In this chapter, we review methods of collection, preparation, and detection of MPs considering the main difficulties that faces the environmental quantitative assessment. The MPs that appear in the water samples should be preprocessed to remove other contaminated organic matters. The identification and separation of the MPs using the visual process or sieving is an important stage in the analysis procedure. However, there are other alternative methods to determine the MPs particles which were highlighted in this chapter. For instance, various techniques can be used for MPs identification and their chemical compositions such as emission scanning electron microscope (FESEM), Fourier transform infrared spectra (FT-IR), Raman spectra, NMR, and thermal analysis. Herein, various studies reviewed the sampling and analysis methodology of MPs and the compelling need to create comparable and standardized procedures for processing samples and performing detections in contexts. Therefore, it is recommended to create reproducible and standardized methodologies for MP sampling and analysis to help producing comparable and reasonable results.