Blog • December 1, 2025

A Better Way to Measure?

By Benjamin Scott •5 min read

Research

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I just finished and published a wiki article on microplastic quantification, going over the techniques currently used to measure how much plastic contamination there is in a given sample, and while researching I started to wonder. You can go read the wiki, but to summarize for you here, there are major drawbacks in cost, processing speed, and sensitivity for the existing state-of-the-art techniques. Raman microscopes, which use tiny lasers to detect the makeup of whatever they’re pointed at, can cost $500,000 at the high end. The other techniques present various drawbacks of their own, like either not being sensitive enough to detect transparent or small plastics, or not measuring certain interesting information at all, like concentration or particle size.

The fact that these techniques are so costly, complex, and time consuming, and that they still don’t fully measure the contamination of a given sample makes me wonder whether there is another direction that could be explored. In keeping with the approach I laid out back when I started the substack, absent really solid information on what health effects result from specific substances in specific quantities, the easiest approach to take is simply total avoidance, to the extent that such is possible. Thus, I wonder whether a much cheaper, faster, more user-friendly and perhaps more portable solution could be devised, which only tells you whether plastic is present (above a threshold¹) or not. If such a thing could be made very cheap, it could go a long way towards quantifying the most impactful environmental changes for people to make in their own homes, workplaces, cars, diets, etc.

The project of ZPAC, as longtime readers know, is rather ambitious–really freeing people from plastic exposure is not trivial. Enabling something like a level I solution is going to require a major improvement in the ease of measuring microplastics’ presence. A literature review is of course forthcoming, but the gist of what’s out there currently is that we don’t really know where the plastics are all coming from–just that indoor environments are the prime exposure areas. Absent this information, it’s difficult to advise people on the most important things they should & shouldn’t have around them to minimize negative effects. And considering that almost everything in a modern house is plastic, from the flooring to the paint on the walls to the stuffing in the furniture, it would go a long way towards helping people decrease their exposure if we knew exactly which of these objects was contributing the most to the problem.

Imagining alternatives

Thus, to attempt to nail down something closer to what I’m looking for, I can try to sketch out some desirable properties. That it be as cheap, convenient to use, and physically small as possible goes without saying. But for the purposes of the kind of indoor environment optimization process I was getting at in the last paragraph, perhaps it would be good if it could also determine presence broken out by plastic type (for example polypropylene gets one result, polyethylene another, polyurethane a third, PTFE a fourth, and so on). Because the different surfaces in the house have different characteristic polymers in use, I’d imagine this sort of thing could go a very long way towards helping people eliminate microplastic-generating sources one by one.

To imagine what this could look like, perhaps something like a swab with various enzymes, which are designed at room temperature to react only (or much more actively) with one polymer or another, to fluoresce² or release a different compound that can then be measured more directly. Quantification or detection of the easier-to-measure byproducts would give the various “present/not present” values for all the plastics the test is searching for.

Another potential approach would be a device that simulates accelerated plastic degradation conditions on different surfaces in a localized way, then takes advantage of local positioning to quantify how much plastic was released under those simulated circumnstances (say, within an enclosure that’s sealed against the surface, or otherwise containing it). A lot of plastics degrade very quickly under UV light, heating & cooling, and mechanical disturbance; I’m envisioning a device you could put against a wall or couch or something like that which then locally shines UV, heats rapidly, vibrates, or something like that, then measures the amount of plastics that were cast off. By comparing each surface’s propensity to degrade, or the rate at which they each do under the simulated environment, one could establish a plausible hierarchy of what objects in the environment are the most likely culprits of indoor contamination, and thus the highest priority targets for replacement (with a non-plastic alternative, of course).

It wouldn’t do to simply complain about this stuff, of course. I’m very optimistic that not only will we arrive at solutions for all these measurement problems, but that more broadly this all presents a massive opportunity for improving people’s health, improving the quality of our homes and environments, and improving our relationships with animals and the natural world. All that needs to happen is for talented people to start working on these problems. There is so much to learn and so much improvement to be made! As always, thanks for reading. I haven’t implemented a comment section at time of writing this (on zpac.net, that is) so if you’re reading there and have a thought you’d like to share, just email me at [email protected]. See you again soon!