The Ministry of Ecology and Environment has recently issued a notice on the public consultation on the “Table of Ecological Monitoring Standard System for New Pollutants (Draft for Comments)” to regulate the ecological monitoring of new pollutants and strengthen the top-level design of ecological monitoring standards.
On 25 March 2024, the Chemicals Working Group of China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) responded positively to the call, and after careful study, CBCGDF submitted the following 3 proposals, to serve its scientific decision-making:
Recommendation: To add a standard: “Technical Specification for Microplastics Detection in Laboratories” in the microplastics section of the “Table 3 Item List of Ecological Environment Monitoring Standard System for New Pollutants”.
[Reason] At present, there is a lack of unified technical specifications for laboratory testing on microplastics, which leads to laboratory analysis of samples contaminated by microplastic fragments (e.g., a large number of tiny fragments of plastic fibres diffused in the air). Therefore, there is an urgent need to establish testing technical specifications for laboratories to ensure the scientific validity and authenticity of sample test results.
[Case study] A study published in the journal Environmental Total Science in early 2024 was conducted by a team led by Professor Bettina Meyer and Dr Sebastian Plimpke of the Alfred Weingen Institute. The study warns that omitting the extraction step during sample preparation could lead to false positive results. The study found that Antarctic krill stomach contents contained low levels of microplastic particles (only 4 out of 60 stomachs contained microplastic particles, according to the results), and were not as “highly contaminated with microplastics” as claimed in several previous studies. They therefore recommended that a standardised sampling and analysis protocol be developed to prevent false positive results.
(This article is a record of daily work, and basically from machine translation for reference ONLY.)
Reference:
https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/AVtOehZoAKSn2Tu5CCwdcA
Primpke, S., Meyer, B., Falcou-Préfol, M., Schütte, W., Gerdts, G., At second glance: The importance of strict quality control – a case study on microplastic in the Southern Ocean key species Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, Science of the Total Environment (2024). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2024.170618
Editor | samantha
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