文献类型：期刊文献

英文题名：Optimising microplastics analysis for quantifying and identifying microplastic fibres in laundry wastewater

作者：Tarte, James, V[1];Johir, Md Abu Hasan[1];Tra, Van-Tung[2];Cai, Zhengqing[3];Wang, Qilin[1];Nghiem, Long D.[1]

机构：[1]Univ Technol Sydney, Ctr Technol Water & Wastewater, Sydney, NSW 2007, Australia;[2]Nguyen Tat Thanh Univ, Inst Environm Sci, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam;[3]East China Univ Sci & Technol, Natl Engn Res Ctr Ind Wastewater Detoxicat & Resou, Shanghai 200237, Peoples R China

年份：2024

卷号：952

外文期刊名：SCIENCE OF THE TOTAL ENVIRONMENT

收录：;EI(收录号：20243617002691);WOS:【SCI-EXPANDED(收录号:WOS:001310324000001)】；

基金：This project was partially supported by the NSW government under the scheme of NSW Small Business Innovation & Research program. James Tartes acknowledges scholarship support from the Australian Government via the Research Training Program. Qilin Wang is an Associate Editor of the journal but was not involved in the peer review or handling of this paper.

语种：英文

外文关键词：MP fibres; Laundry wastewater; Fluorescence excitation wavelength; Microscopic FTIR spectroscopy analysis; Sample pretreatment

摘要：Current methods for measuring microplastic fibres (MPF) are cumbersome, time consuming and unscalable for routine high throughput analysis. This study reports a method for rapidly extracting, quantifying and analysing MPFs in laundry wastewater with several key improvements which vastly enhance overall efficiency and scalability of analysis. FT-IR surveying is employed as a preliminary step in analysis to quickly determine what polymers are present in a sample prior to fluorescence treatment. Using random quadrating, whole 25 mm filter membranes were surveyed in <30 min with high recovery rates. In industrial laundry wastewater samples, polyester was the most common MPF, however acrylic, nylon, cotton and rayon were all ubiquitous. The study also demonstrates that an excitation wavelength of 365 nm was optimal for fluorescing PET fibres like polyester which were stained with Nile Red, but not 495 nm, which is commonly used in microplastic analysis. Finally, a custom ImageJ macro was written to automatically enumerate and describe MPFs on filter membranes using just a single stitched fluorescence image. In just a few seconds, concentrations of up to 40,000 fibres/L were analysed in industrial laundry wastewater samples with a lower particle size limit of 20 mu m. This study highlights the need for more optimised and scalable analysis workflows which maintain high levels of reliability and accuracy.