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A method to replace NaCl as a flotation solution for extracting MPs in soil: A case study of the Jiaxing agricultural soil from China
Summary
Researchers tested magnesium chloride (MgCl2) as a replacement for sodium chloride in density-based microplastic extraction from agricultural soils in China. MgCl2 proved more effective at extracting a wider range of plastic types, including denser polymers that NaCl cannot float. This method improvement could help researchers obtain more complete and accurate measurements of microplastics in soil.
Abstract Microplastics (MPs) have become an important global issue in recent years. However, MPs in the soil have received far less attention than those in water. Effective and nondestructive extraction of MPs is important for studying MPs in agricultural soils. This study uses different floatation solutions as experiments and uses MgCl 2 as the floatation solution of the density extraction method. This method can quickly and comprehensively extract MPs in agricultural soil, and is inexpensive and nontoxic. Five types of standard MPs (PE, PP, PS, PVC and PET) are used as the objects of this experiment, and each have two different particle sizes (3 mm and 0.075 mm). The accuracy and precision of the method were verified using standard addition and recovery. The recovery of the two particle sizes was between 90.82% and 109.69%. The extracted standard MPs were then subjected to IR and Raman spectroscopic analysis, and the results showed that Raman spectroscopy was more suitable for the identification of the extracted MPs. Finally, this method collected and verified a vast number of soil samples and further analyzed the abundance and characteristics of the collected MPs. The results show that the use of MgCl 2 as the floatation solution of the density extraction method to extract MPs from the soil may be an alternative to the current NaCl method.