Given the increased interest in microplastics and potential environmental and physiological impacts, is there a practical way to add a sensor for airborne microplastics to the sensor suite of AirGradient?
thanks.
Quantifying the mass of airborne microplastics is very challenging, even with the most sophisticated offline analysis using instruments that cost hundreds of thousands of US Dollars.
Why?
Plastics are a heterogenous group of various compounds that are chemically different to each other. The term “plastics” itself is ambiguous with no uniform definition. Is natural rubber from tyres also plastics? Note that the chemical subunits of natural rubber are also present in trees next to roads: how can natural rubber from tyres be quantified without misclassifing the contributions from trees? After 6 decades of research effort, there is still no consensus about the abundance of airborne tyre particles, despite the use of most advanced analytical methods and the focus on just one type of microplastics.
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