Preliminary study on microplastics in surface water of Sarawak river

Degradation of plastics in the environment produce small fragments which the size is usually less than 5 mm, known as microplastics. This study was designed to investigate the abundance of the microplastics in Sarawak River including their morphological features, chemical characterisation and surface texture. Overall, there are 138 particles found. The identification of microplastics was conducted based on the physical characterisation (type, colour, size) and chemical characterisation (ATR FTIR analysis) for a functional group of polymers. Fragment type, white colour and size of 4 mm microplastics were most dominant in the area. Polypropylene was the most abundant chemical compound found. The result was analysed by One-way Analysis Variance (ANOVA), there was a significant difference of total microplastics between all the stations. It is recommended to conduct this research in future for baseline information on microplastic issue in Malaysia