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Updated: Sep 21, 2026

Protocol for Microplastics Sampling on the Sea Surface and Sample Analysis
Published on: December 16, 2016
Occurrence and distribution of microplastics in the adjacent environment of Yellow River Delta, China
Ruibo Ding1, Qiaoling Li2, Kang Wang3
1School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, North University of China, Taiyuan 030051, China; Institute of Quality Standards and Testing Technology, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing 100097, China; Beijing Municipal Key Laboratory of Agriculture Environment Monitoring, Beijing 100097, China.
Abstract:
In the precent study, the microplastics (MPs) pollution level was evaluated in diverse environmental samples from the Yellow River Delta. The results indicated that the abundance of MPs in water, sediment and soil samples ranged from 0.50 to 7.83 items·L-1, 200 to 4200 items·kg-1, and 100 to 1400 items·kg-1, respectively. Film form of MPs was dominant in water, while fiber MPs were dominant in both sediment and soil samples. In all samples, most MPs were < 1 mm in size. White was the main color in water, black was the main color in sediment and soil samples. The most common MPs type was polyethylene (33 %) in water, while rayon accounted for the majority of MPs in sediment (42 %) and soil (70 %) samples. The redundancy analysis results showed that MPs in water and sediment were more affected by water quality, while soil MPs were easily affected by landscape pattern.

