Albatross:
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Timing, frequency, places, methods, required accuracy and reporting items all depend on the purpose, so it is important to make the purpose clear first.

Common examples:

• Understand how much and what kinds of microplastics leak in a region
• Get data to help plan plastic leakage countermeasures
• Check whether current countermeasures work
  

Microplastics can be collected from water (especially near the surface), from the bottom (mud) or from beaches (sand). If you choose only one, we recommend sampling from the water.
*If you also want to collect heavy plastics that sink, we add sampling from the bottom. We adjust the method to your purpose.

For sampling from the water, we pass water through a net with 0.1 mm or 0.3 mm mesh and collect what remains in the net.
To get enough water through the net, we choose from towing by boat, natural flow or motorized flow. (Pirika can do all of these.)

This step removes solids that are clearly not plastic from the sample and cleans the surface, to make the analysis more accurate.

Options are chemical treatment or visual sorting. For quality, we recommend treatment with hydrogen peroxide solution.

Using analyzers such as FT-IR, we read the composition, size, shape and color of the microplastics.

Many microplastics surveys stop at finding the composition and amount. Pirika goes further, estimating the original products and narrowing down the leakage routes, to give analysis that helps solve the root of the problem.

We deliver reports (Word or PowerPoint). We can also publish the results as open data and share them with local residents.