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Identifying and Characterizing Microplastics
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This book chapter reviews analytical methods for microplastic extraction, identification, and quantification across environmental matrices including soil, surface water, and marine environments, identifying density separation as the primary extraction method and FTIR and Raman spectroscopy as the standard identification tools. The authors recommend development of standardized procedures to enable consistent and comparable results across studies.
Microplastics (MPs) as a novel pollution problem have received increasing attention from scholars and policymakers. Identification and quantification of microplastics are of important significance for practically unraveling the characteristics of MPs pollution in the environments. Therefore, the objective of this chapter is to summarize and discuss the methods for analyzing MPs, including methods for extraction, identification, and quantification. From the literature, the authors identified density separation as an extraction method and Fourier transform infrared and Raman spectroscopy for identification but found that other methods have not yet been fully demonstrated using practical applications. In this regard, the authors recommend standardized procedures for extracting, identifying, and quantifying MPs in different environments (soil, surface water, marine, and other media) to provide insights into understanding and eliminating microplastic pollution.
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Analytical and Detection Techniques for Microplastics
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This chapter reviewed analytical and detection techniques for microplastics across environmental matrices, covering sampling strategies, separation methods, and identification tools including FTIR and Raman spectroscopy, with discussion of their sensitivity, cost, and suitability for different environmental monitoring applications.
Characterization Techniques for Quantifying Environmental Microplastics
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This book chapter reviews the analytical methods used to detect, identify, and quantify microplastics across different environmental media — water, sediment, air, and biota — covering techniques like FTIR spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and electron microscopy. A standardized, well-validated toolkit for characterizing microplastics is foundational to producing comparable data across the thousands of studies now being conducted worldwide.
Analytical methods for identifying microplastics in environment: a critical review
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This review systematically covers the full analytical pipeline for identifying environmental microplastics — from sample collection and density separation through digestion, filtration, and spectroscopic identification — highlighting that Raman spectroscopy outperforms FTIR for particles under 10 µm and that method standardization remains the central challenge for cross-study comparability.
Microplastics: An overview on separation, identification and characterization of microplastics
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This review provides an overview of methods for separating, identifying, and characterizing microplastics from water, sediment, and air samples, including techniques like FTIR spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and density separation. The study highlights the lack of standardized protocols and the difficulty of detecting particles smaller than one micrometer, which are classified as nanoplastics.
Analytical tools in advancing microplastics research for identification and quantification across environmental media: from sample to insight
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Researchers reviewed the analytical tools most commonly used for identifying and quantifying microplastics, focusing on FTIR and Raman spectroscopy as the two primary methods. The review compared their strengths and limitations and provided guidance for choosing between them based on particle size, sample matrix, and research objectives.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.