Characterization of Plastic Large Micro Particles (LMP) from the beach sand of Lido Island (Venice, Italy)

The presence of Large Micro Particles (LMP) in coastal beach sediment is extremely variable and affected by seasonality and overtime events. A robust discussion on such atopic for a given site would require a representative amount of collected samples (and corresponding data) in space and time. In general the proven chemical identification of microplastic debris is a relatively easy task and it’s usually obtained almost effortless with user friendly spectroscopic analyzers such as Near Infra Red – NIR and Infrared (FT-IR). The real challenge is to perform a representative sampling and a qualified physical characterization in terms of size and shape.A summary of the very first sampling and analysis of LMP in the sediment of the Alberoni beach of the Lido island (Venice, Italy), in a coastal protected area never investigated before, is here presented with a critical discussion of the on-the-field and subsequent in-the-lab hitches encountered. A seasonal comparison of two sampling campaigns, October and December 2014, have been performed in terms of LMP abundance, chemical composition, color and item category mostly according to European guidelines [1]. Chemical analysis was performed with through NIR spectroscopy and Raman coupled to microscopy: a comparison of the two techniques in terms of size capability (i.e. macro vs. micro) is presented along with the corresponding microphotographs of extracted plastic samples and the role of the adsorbedorganic pollutants on their surface.