Quantitative Analysis of Poly(ethylene terephthalate) Microplastics in Soil via Thermogravimetry–Mass Spectrometry

The use of plastic materials in daily life, industry, and agriculture can cause soil pollution with plastic fragments down to the micrometer scale, i.e., microplastics. Quantitative assessment of microplastics in soil has been limited so far. Until now, microplastic analyses in soil require laborious sample cleanup and are mostly restricted to qualitative assessments. In this study, we applied thermogravimetry-mass spectrometry (TGA-MS) to develop a method for the direct quantitative analysis of poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) without further sample pretreatment. For this, soil samples containing 1.61 ± 0.15 wt % organic matter were spiked with 0.23-4.59 wt % PET bottle recyclate microplastics. dl-Cysteine was used as the internal standard (IS). Sample mixtures were pyrolyzed with a 5 K min^-1 ramp (40-1000 °C), while sample mass loss and MS signal intensity of typical PET pyrolysis products were recorded. We found MS signal intensities linearly responding to microplastic concentrations. The most-promising results were obtained with the IS-corrected PET pyrolysis product vinylbenzene/benzoic acid ( m/ z = 105, adj. R² = 0.987). The limits of detection and quantification were 0.07 and 1.72 wt % PET, respectively. Our results suggest that TGA-MS can be an easy and viable complement to existing methods such as pyrolysis or thermogravimetry-thermal desorption assays followed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry detection or to spectral microscopy techniques.