Comment by schobi
7 hours ago
Summary: dry contact with nearly any laboratory glove will lead to sample contamination and over estimation of microplastics. They found one type of clean room gloves that contaminate less.
Is there any indication on how bad this really is?
Around 2000 to over 7000 false positives per mm^2 based on the type of glove. Essentially, regular lab gloves shed enough particles to swamp microplastic measurements to warrant switching to clean room gloves for this type of analysis.
Shouldn't any lab analysis have control samples to detect environment contamination like this?
It's difficult to avoid contamination, since everything (samples, containers, equipements, etc) will have been in contact with glove at least once, and good decontamination is very hard.
Yes, exactly, that's why you use control samples to get the baseline.
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