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A Nanoplastic Sampling and Enrichment Approach by Continuous Flow Centrifugation
Summary
This study developed a continuous flow centrifugation method for sampling and concentrating nanoplastics from water, achieving enrichment efficiencies over 90% for particles smaller than 1 micrometer. This sampling approach addresses a critical technical gap: the difficulty of detecting and quantifying nanoplastics that are too small for conventional filtration methods.
Substantial efforts have been undertaken to isolate and characterize plastic contaminants in different sample matrices in the last years as the ubiquitous presence of particulate plastic in the environment has become evident. In comparison, plastic particles 90%. In a proof-of-principle setup, it was demonstrated that operating two continuous flow centrifuges sequentially at different rotational speeds bears the potential to enable size- and density-selective sampling of the colloidal fraction. A significant fraction of the spiked nanoplastic particles (76% ± 5% (uc)) could be separated from a model mixture of natural particles with a well-defined mean size of approximately 3 µm. While the certified reference plankton material used here was quantitatively retained in the first centrifuge rotor together with 23.0% ± 2.2% of the effective dose of the spiked nanoplastic, the remaining fraction of the nanoplastic could be recovered in the second rotor (53% ± 5%) and the effluent (24.4% ± 2.4% (uc)). Based on the good retention