TY - CONF A1 - Ciornii, Dmitri A1 - Hodoroaba, Vasile-Dan A1 - Altmann, Korinna T1 - Validation of microplastics detection methods and proficiency testing: Suitable microplastic reference materials for interlaboratory comparison N2 - Since microplastics (MPs) can be found everywhere and are becoming a problem of high concern, it is necessary to understand their physico-chemical properties. To obtain reliable analytical data a set of validated methods for sampling, sample preparation, detection, and data evaluation are needed. To meet these needs an interlaboratory comparison (ILC) with 84 participants worldwide has been organized under the international pre-standardisation platform VAMAS (www.vamas.org/twa45/) as Project 2 “Development of standardized methodologies for characterisation of microplastics with microscopy and spectroscopy methods” within the Technical Working Area TWA 45 “Micro and Nano Plastics in the Environment”. In this ILC thermo-analytical methods (Py-GC/MS and TED-GC/MS) and vibrational methods (µ-Raman and µ-FTIR) have been tested and compared by providing a set of microplastic representative test materials and measurement protocols developed at BAM. The defined measurands were: particle number concentration, particle size distribution (PSD), and polymer identity and mass content. To increase the statistical quality, 6 samples were shipped together with blank samples. Hence, the ILC provides information on precision and accuracy of the results obtained with different methods as well as strengths and limitations of the proposed protocols. T2 - SETAC 34th Meeting CY - Seville, Spain DA - 05.05.2024 KW - ILC KW - Microplastic KW - Method validation KW - Stakeholder KW - Reference materials KW - Polyethylene KW - Polyethylene Terephtalate PY - 2024 AN - OPUS4-60039 LA - eng AD - Bundesanstalt fuer Materialforschung und -pruefung (BAM), Berlin, Germany ER -