Rapid measurement of microplastic contamination in chicken meat by mid infrared spectroscopy and chemometrics: A feasibility study

Abstract

Microplastic detection has been acknowledged as challenging so far, particularly regarding in-situ analysis. Although much effort on the use of rapid analytical methods to analyse and identify microplastics in the environment, less has been done on the identification and measurement of microplastics contained in the food matrix. The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of a rapid method based on attenuated total reflection mid infrared (ATR-MIR) spectroscopy combined with chemometric techniques to identify the level of contamination in homogenised chicken meat with microplastics polystyrene (PS, particle size 100 μm) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC, 3 μm, 100 μm and 2–4 mm). We have evaluated the contamination of chicken meat with various amount of microplastics using MIR spectroscopy. Despite the moderate detection sensitivity of the method, the ATR-MIR can be a rapid and reliable analytical tool to detect and quantify high levels (between 1 up to 10%) of addition/contamination of microplastics to chicken meat. This is the first study to explore the feasibility of measuring microplastics within the context of chicken meat. The method once optimised with improved sensitivity would in future greatly enhance the applicability of measuring microplastics in an organism or tissue sample without damaging its original form, or even the possibility of detection in living organisms.