METHOD FOR IDENTIFICATION OF BLACK MICROPLASTICS BY USING TIRE LIBRARY

Abstract

 Road dust is considered to be one of the main sources of MPs washed out into the ocean, and rubber pieces from tires can have adverse effects on the ecosystem. However, tires are a mixture of synthetic rubber and natural rubber, and carbon black causes an increase of the absorption residue in IR spectrum, which limits material identification by ATR-FTIR. Therefore, in this study, we proposed a method to judge whether the black samples are tire debris or not by registering the spectrum of tire debris in the library for ATR-FTIR. The spectral shapes differ depending on the tire part. Furthermore, application of tire spectrum library was useful to analyze black MPs in the environmental samples collected from an urban area, improving the detection of tire debris and the material identification.