Department of Agricultural, Environmental and Food Sciences (DiAAA), University of Molise, via De Sanctis, I-86100 Campobasso, Italy.
Department of Chemistry, University of Rome "La Sapienza", p.le Aldo Moro 5, I-00185 Rome, Italy.
Food Chem. 2023 Mar 15;404(Pt B):134682. doi: 10.1016/j.foodchem.2022.134682. Epub 2022 Oct 20.
Sea salt can be considered as a vector of microplastics in the human body. In this work, the sea salts collected from three Italian salterns has been solubilized in MilliQ water and filtered to extract microplastics. The visual quantification of microplastics with a stereomicroscope was carried out on the bases of their size, followed by a classification taking into account their physical characteristics. ATR-FTIR and Raman spectroscopy were used to identify the polymeric type of microplastics. Their significant presence has been revealed: 1653 ± 29 microplastics/kg of sea salt. In total, 80.6 % of microplastics have a fiber shape, 18.9 % a fragmented shape and 2.7 % are sphere. The size of microplastics has been analysed, indicating that the most frequent is between 0 and 500 µm. Polypropylene, polyamide and polyethylene were identified as the most frequent types of polymers. This research could be of global relevance given the significant export of Italian salt to foreign countries.
海盐可以被视为人体中微塑料的载体。在这项工作中，从三个意大利盐场收集的海盐在 MilliQ 水中溶解并过滤以提取微塑料。基于其大小，使用立体显微镜对微塑料进行了目视定量，并考虑其物理特性进行了分类。ATR-FTIR 和拉曼光谱用于鉴定微塑料的聚合物类型。结果表明微塑料的含量非常高：海盐中含有 1653±29 个微塑料/千克。总的来说，80.6%的微塑料呈纤维状，18.9%呈碎片状，2.7%呈球形。分析了微塑料的大小，表明最常见的尺寸在 0 到 500 µm 之间。鉴定出的聚合物类型主要为聚丙烯、聚酰胺和聚乙烯。鉴于意大利盐向国外大量出口，这项研究具有全球意义。
