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Quantification of Microplastics in Soils Using Accelerated Solvent Extraction: Comparison with a Visual Sorting Method
Summary
Researchers evaluated accelerated solvent extraction as an alternative to visual sorting for quantifying microplastics in soil, finding it recovered similar total amounts but with some differences by polymer type. Improving the accuracy and efficiency of soil microplastic measurement is essential for understanding agricultural and terrestrial plastic contamination.
Visual sorting is a method that is widely used in microplastic analysis, but it has limitation in the quantification of small-size microplastics. Accelerated solvent extraction (ASE) which frequently used in the analysis of organic contaminants in soils and sediments was used here for the microplastics quantification. A recovery experiment using different spiked polymeric microplastics separately indicates that ASE was useful in the extraction of low-density and low-melting point polymeric microplastics. High recoveries and low matrix effects were observed for the polyethylene, polypropylene and polystyrene microplastics. A further comparison between ASE and visual sorting was conducted for seven soils from agricultural land used for long-term mulching with plastic films. The results confirmed that ASE was capable of microplastics quantification for farmland soils and polyethylene film in the ASE extracts could be identified by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. Meanwhile, ASE conducted on small samples (3.0 g) gave results that showed close agreement with the visual sorting method.