University of Ottawa

Purpose

This project is designed to better understand the impact of nanoplastics on Canadian waterbodies and to fully investigate the chemical compositions of the nanoplastics in those waterbodies. The project goals are to establish and fine-tune an effective sample pre-treatment and preparation method to separate heterogeneous nanoplastic samples, to establish a novel library of thermal analysis data collected from multi-component mixtures of model nanoplastics commonly found in Canadian environmental samples, to validate nanoplastics test protocols using both spiked and real-world samples, and ultimately to identify and quantitatively analyze nanoplastics in Canadian waterbodies.