00:00The environmental health is connected with human health because the consumption of seafood,
00:05for example fish that we ingest, the microplastics that they ingest will end up in our body.
00:10Microplastics have effects on ecosystems.
00:13Ecosystems, they provide services to us, so they are important for us as well.
00:31First of all, we need to take samples, so there are different techniques for this.
00:35What we usually use is a manta net, so this is a net that floats at the surface of the
00:40ocean
00:40and thousands of litres of water will go through it and all the microplastics will be retained in the net.
00:46And so we then recover those microplastics and we bring them to our labs.
00:49So first there is a processing step that we need to do to get rid of the organic material
00:53and then in the next step we go towards the analysis of the sample.
00:57The technique that we use makes use of a fluorescence coloration, so a fluorescent dye.
01:02So we stain the particles and then we use machine learning to identify particles based on their coloration.
01:08And then we also do a check with the FTIR, so that's a spectroscopy-based method to validate particle identity.
01:29It's a screening method meant for monitoring of microplastics and so we start from a training data set for the
01:34model
01:35in which we have seven of the main polymers included, so the ones that are most often found at sea.
01:41Of course, if you want to study very specific polymer types, you would need to adapt the model, which you
01:46can do.
01:46So we target the most common ones.
01:48And of course, it's not a chemical analysis, so it's a screening.
01:52So you would need to do a validation always of a subset of particles.
02:03It is important to know how many plastics there are present at sea, because we want to assess the trends
02:10over longer periods.
02:12So it's very important that we have continuous data and to identify hotspots, for example, areas of concern, where there
02:18might be risks, where not.
02:19And then, of course, also it's important to know the composition of your sample.
02:23For example, the size of the microplastics has an impact, has an influence on the environmental impact, also different polymer
02:29types, shapes and so on.
Comments