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Small Microplastic Sampling in Water: Development of an Encapsulated Filtration Device
Summary
A new encapsulated filtration device was developed for sampling small microplastics (in the lower micrometer size range) from water, reducing contamination and sample loss compared to standard net methods. Capturing very small microplastics is important because this size range is particularly abundant and potentially most harmful.
A variety of microplastic sampling instrumentation is currently used for water pollution studies. Plankton net-based approaches have been the most adopted techniques for water column and surface sampling. When applied to microplastics (MP) in the lower µm size range these methods, however, introduce non-negligible risks of sample contamination and loss due to instrument and procedure design. Based on the first principles of systems engineering design we have developed a mobile sampling platform for field application that fulfils the needs of producing usable MP samples with a lower size limit of 10 µm using an encapsulated flow-through filtration concept. Here, we explain the requirements, development, and construction of the device for others to replicate and improve.