Risk assessment of microplastic in commercial salt sold in Malaysia

Commercial salt sold in Malaysia may be viewed as a source of microplastics in human daily life because salt is the main food ingredient that has been used every day, especially as the food seasoning. During the production of salt, microplastic may enter to the seawater due to their smaller size and difficult to be filter. Processed of sea salt from polluted seawater increase the presence of microplastic in table salt. The presence of microplastic may give adverse effect on human health. The main objective of this study is to conduct the risk assessment of microplastics in commercial salt sold from Malaysia since there is not many studies accesses to the risk assessment in commercial salt. 17 type of salt packaging were chosen as the study material where the type of salt used are sea salts and rock salt by random sampling. The material bought from random supermarket. It was a cross-sectional study and lab-based project. Using a stereomicroscope, microplastics were visually quantified according to their size, shape, and color of microplastics, and then they were categorized according to their physical attributes. FTIR is used to identify the polymer of microplastics. Statistical analysis was performed using SPSS 28.0.0.0. The risk assessment used in this study are Estimation Daily Intake (EDI) for health risk assessment and Ecological Risk Index for ecological risk assessment. Most of microplastics found are in the shape of a fibre and fragment, which is fragment is the dominant shape than fibre in this study. The size of microplastics that are frequently found in this study is between 35 and 300 μm. The particles count recorded between 11.7 ± 16.1 to 123.3±22.5 particles/kg. Polyethylene Terephtalate (PET), Poly-1-butene (PB), Polystrene (PES) and polyethylene (PE) were identified as the most frequent types of polymers in this study. The type of polymer found in the sample is an important indicator of the presence of microplastics. EDI when 5g/day portion is ingested 0.15-1.68 particles/day. The category level for Ecological Risk Index poses under minor and medium danger. It is important to take care of our health by minimize the intake of salt because it will give a negative impact on our health, and it is suggested for other researcher added Raman spectroscopies as a future method because it is considered have a better resolution, wider spectral coverage, and lower water interference. To the best of our knowledge, this is the study on risk assessment of microplastic pollution in commercial salt sold in Malaysia. Thus, more details about MPs pollution in the Malaysia, environmental research, and food safety were provided by this study.