The issue of plastic pollution is one of the challenges of the coming years. When it comes to agriculture,
this material is widely used, although its degradation leads to formation of micro- and nanoplastics,
whose impact is being studied within the Minagris project. In particular, the identification and
quantification of nanoplastics in soil can be challenging due to their size, which is below the special
resolution of several techniques typically used for the characterization, as Raman or μ-FTIR analysis.
Furthermore, the presence of organic matter or biological agents makes these techniques unsuitable for
this purpose. Pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy enables to investigate nanosized plastic
samples with low limit of detection (LOD) and limit of quantification (LOQ). In this work, some of the
main types of plastic used in farming have been tested at the nanoscale; with optimized parameters of
py-GC/MS, calibration curves of these polymers have been obtained, in order to test out the likelihood of
analysing them not only qualitatively, but also quantitively. Strong linear correlation has been found
between the peak areas of the markers of each polymer and its quantity under analysis, an outcome
that may be useful for real nanoplastic samples
