Week 8!

Hello everyone! I finally got to extract most of the micro-plastics from the sediment. From my observations, plastic 5 and plastic 6 were the hardest to extract! It was a bit tedious, but manageable. I filled most of the samples #1-#30 with distilled water again so I can be capable of extracting most of the micro plastics that I can from the sediment. After doing that, I will be proceeding with extracting the micro plastics using salt water to extract it. So far, I am pretty satisfied with the results that I am seeing and cant wait to get onto extracting micro plastics and micro fibers from our tap water!
- Francisco

Week 6: Continuing Extraction of Microplastics!

Hello everyone,

I hope your week has been great! This week, I finished off with extracting as much micro plastics as I possibly could using a micro-pipette. I really thought this would be simple but I didn't realize how much time and tedious work this could be! I finished extracting as much plastic from plastic 2 classified as HDPE, a high-density polyethylene. Now I am to wait for the sediment to dry so I can continue with redoing the process again. I will continue tomorrow with extracting the rest of the micro-plastics from plastics 3-5, known as polyvinyl chloride, low-density polyethylene, polypropylene. Have a good spring break everyone!

- Francisco