this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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doomer

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[–] WrongOnTheInternet@hexbear.net 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Mostly polyethylene

I'm not fully convinced that py-GC/MS is great for plastics quantitation but there you go

[–] mrfugu@hexbear.net 9 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Oh cool the most basic hydrocarbon chain lol. No I too have doubts on quantifying plastics with GC/MS. I don’t run tests like that but I do work with the results/analytical and unreactive plastic compounds like this are almost never detected with confidence.

The data is good to see though where did you get this?

[–] WrongOnTheInternet@hexbear.net 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] mrfugu@hexbear.net 2 points 3 days ago

Nice! After doing some research it seems the general consensus is that LDIR is better for detecting and distinguishing plastics, but only detects down to a radius of ~5um. In this paper they opted to use py-GC/MS in order to document smaller particles.

The problem with pyrolysis however is that by busting everything up it’s more likely that polyethylene can be confused with other hydrocarbons. In the paper it seems their only confirmation is that the data matches up with other labs that have run the same py-GC/MS tests. The paper also mentioned someone using electron microscopy to see microplastics in brain tissue, describing them as “nanoscale shard-like fragments.” However there’s no source for it and I can’t find it.

I did find this article comparing microplastic detection methods I thought was pretty interesting. A few years old tho.