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Recent Advances in Spectroscopic Techniques for the Analysis of Microplastics in Food
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This review summarizes recent advances in spectroscopic techniques for detecting and identifying microplastics in food products. Researchers evaluated methods including FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, and emerging hyperspectral imaging approaches for analyzing microplastics of various sizes, shapes, and materials. The study highlights the strengths and limitations of each technique and identifies gaps in our ability to reliably assess microplastic contamination in the food supply.
Microplastic pollution has become a worldwide concern in aquatic and terrestrial environments. Microplastics could also enter the food chain, causing potential harm to human health. To facilitate the risk assessment of microplastics to humans, it is critically important to have a reliable analytical technique to detect, quantify, and identify microplastics of various materials, sizes, and shapes from environmental, agricultural, and food matrices. Spectroscopic techniques, mainly vibrational spectroscopy (Raman and infrared), are commonly used techniques for microplastic analysis. This review focuses on recent advances of these spectroscopic techniques for the analysis of microplastics in food. The fundamental, recent technical advances of the spectroscopic techniques and their advantages and limitations were summarized. The food sample pretreatment methods and recent applications for detecting and quantifying microplastics in different types of food were reviewed. In addition, the current technical challenges and future research directions were discussed. It is anticipated that the advances in instrument development and methodology innovation will enable spectroscopic techniques to solve critical analytical challenges in microplastic analysis in food, which will facilitate the reliable risk assessment.
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