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The importance of integrating morphological attributes of microplastics: a theoretical discussion to assess environmental impacts
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Researchers used a theoretical approach to argue that reporting microplastic results solely as particle counts — without accounting for morphological attributes such as size, volume, mass, or specific surface area — leads to significant misrepresentation of environmental impact when comparing supposedly equivalent samples.
Most scientific studies on microplastic (MP) pollution report their results as number of particles (e.g., particles/m, particles/m, particles/kg dw). An important limitation of this expression is to consider all MP particles as environmentally equivalent, regardless of their size, volume, mass, or specific surface area. Using a theoretical approach, we advocate that including such morphological attributes reveals significant differences in results of supposedly equivalent samples that consider only the number of particles. Our goal is to present how particle size and shape produce different results for hypothetical samples with the same number of particles. Therefore, from these examples we expect to stimulate the debate and contribute to improve accuracy and comparability of studies on MP pollution.
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