Investigation of New Analysis Methods for Simultaneous and Rapid Identification of Five Different Microplastics Using ATR-FTIR Spectroscopy and Chemometrics

Microplastic (MP) pollution in water has become one of the most important global problems of our time. The development of appropriate and rapid analysis techniques is of great importance at the beginning of the studies aimed at solving this problem. In the presented study, in order to perform the qualitative and quantitative analysis of MP forms of polyamide (PA), polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS), and polyethylene terephthalate (PET), which are known to be most abundant in water, in a fast and easy way, new Attenuated Total Reflectance-Fourier Transform Infrared (ATR-FTIR) spectroscopy methods were tried to be developed by utilizing chemometric methods. While principal component analysis (PCA) was applied for qualitative analyses, partial least squares (PLS) models were created for quantitative analyses. Raw, 1