• DOI:10.1021/acs.est.9b03105
• Corpus ID: 195756469

Raman Tweezers for small microplastics and nano-plastics identification in seawater.

@article{Gillibert2019RamanTF,
  title={Raman Tweezers for small microplastics and nano-plastics identification in seawater.},
  author={Raymond Gillibert and Gireeshkumar Balakrishnan and Quentin Deshoules and Morgan Tardivel and Alessandro Magazz{\`u} and Maria Grazia Donato and Onofrio Maria Marag{\`o} and Marc Lamy de la Chapelle and Florent Colas and Fabienne Lagarde and Pietro Giuseppe Gucciardi},
  journal={Environmental science \& technology},
  year={2019}
}

• R. Gillibert, G. Balakrishnan, +8 authors P. Gucciardi
• Published 1 July 2019
• Chemistry
• Environmental science & technology

Our understanding of the fate and distribution of micro- and nano- plastics in the marine environ-ment is limited by the intrinsic difficulties of the techniques currently used for the detection, quanti-fication and chemical identification of small particles in liquid (light scattering, vibrational spectros-copies, optical and electron microscopies). Here we introduce Raman Tweezers (RTs), namely op-tical tweezers combined with Raman spectroscopy, as an analytical tool for the study of micro- and nano-plastics in sea water. We show optical trapping and chemical identification of sub-20 µm plastics, down to the 50 nm range. Analysis at the single particle level allows us to unambiguously discriminate plastics from organic matter and mineral sediments, overcoming the capacities of standard Raman spectroscopy in liquid, intrinsically limited to ensemble measurements. Being a microscopy technique, RTs also permits to assess the size and shapes of particles (beads, frag-ments, fibres), with spatial resolution only limited by diffraction. Applications are shown on both model particles and naturally aged environmental samples, made of common plastic pollutants, in-cluding polyethylene, polypropylene, nylon and polystyrene, also in presence of a thin eco-corona. Coupled to suitable extraction and concentration protocols, RTs have the potential to strongly im-pact future research on micro and nanoplastics environmental pollution, and enable the understand-ing of the fragmentation processes on a multi-scale level of aged polymers.