Microplastic in Freshwater Environment: A Review on Techniques and Abundance for Microplastic Detection in Lake Water

Abstract

Microplastic particles have been detected in water sources such as in oceans, lakes and rivers worldwide, which have received much attention in recent years. This review includes a summary of the analytical techniques such as sampling, processing and identification used by researchers to evaluate microplastic in lake water from 35 studies. Microplastic abundance and its morphological characteristics were also compared. Bulk sampling and volume-reduced sampling were almost equally implemented during sample collection. During sample processing, digestion were followed by 85.71 % of the researcher’s using hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) to degrade the organic matter present in the sample. Though density separation is the most common approach to extract microplastic from sediment sample, this was not the case in lake water as only 31.43 % used this method. Fibers were the most dominant shape and the maximum abundance of microplastics were found to be in < 0.5 and < 2 mm2 size class. Most studies reported microplastic to be of polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP). HIGHLIGHTS Digestion is an important step during sample processing In lake water density separation is less frequently used method Fibers dominated in the size class < 0.5 and < 2 mm Microplastic in lake water is commonly expressed in volume unit GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT