Quantitative Analysis of Microplastics in Seawater Using Pyrolysis and GCMS

Over 300 million tons of plastics are manufactured every year and studies have shown that >10% of these eventually entered and contaminated the ocean. Growing attention on microplastics in sea water with <5 mm diameter size has been increasing with many surveys on measuring these using FTIR and Raman technologies. 

Many analytical techniques only provide limited information on polymer type and size and are not capable in offering an accurate weight percentage of the pollutants. A GCMS pyrolysis technique has been developed by CDS to overcome these limitations.

A previous application described the identification of microplastics in the sea water over ppm concentration using a CDS pyrolysis system from Analytix coupled with a GCMS. This application note is a continued study to further quantify the microplastics concentration and describes using polymer marker peaks for calibration and quantification.

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