Event Focused on Building Best Practices for Sampling, Extraction and Analysis

HORIBA Scientific, global leader in Raman and fluorescence instrumentation, sponsored and organized a workshop to address the threat of microplastics to our environment, hosted at the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project (SCCWRP) in Costa Mesa, CA. SCCWRP and the University of Toronto were co-organizers.

Attended by over 130 regulatory and analytical methods experts, the workshop addressed the need for microplastics research and development, standardized collection methods, and data management and sharing, designed to provide a better understanding, and to drive regulatory policy and reporting.

Topics included sampling methods and extraction techniques, analytical techniques such as FTIR, Raman, and pyr-GC/MS, standard operating procedures for the QA/QC of microplastics, data management/data sharing options and data collection programs in California.

The workshops provide an opportunity to network with leading microplastics researchers and policy makers, to catch up on the state of policy, and the science of microplastics.

HORIBA will be hosting events on the threat of microplastics throughout the year. As a follow up to the workshop, Applied Spectroscopy will be publishing a special issue on microplastics at the beginning of 2020 with a call for papers between now and the fall.  There will also be special sessions on microplastics analysis at SciX in Palm Springs, October 13 – 18.  

HORIBA’s Dr. Andrew Whitley, one of the workshop’s co-organizers, stated that, “HORIBA recognized the threat to the environment from microplastics early on. We created this workshop to help kick start the   process of addressing this threat from the scientific, analytical and political fronts.”

Information on the SCCWRP can be found here: