Verified plant-level wastewater microplastic dataset for v2 descriptive synthesis

This dataset supports the manuscript "From removal efficiency to residual risk: Microplastic effluent release and sludge redistribution in wastewater treatment plants". The repository-ready package contains the cleaned extraction workbook, verified row-level dataset, descriptive-statistics tables, chart-ready summaries, data dictionary, source-study table, metadata, citation template and SVG figure source files.

The dataset includes 36 verified plant- or system-level numerical records used in the v2 descriptive synthesis. These records were extracted from Mason et al. (2016), Maw et al. (2024), and Simon et al. (2018). The dataset includes standardized final effluent microplastic concentrations, paired influent-effluent values where available, removal efficiency, effluent load, sludge concentrations where available, lower particle-size cutoff, identification method, metric-use notes and caveats.

Horton et al. (2021) and Lee et al. (2024) are documented as high-priority extraction scaffolds but were not included in the current numerical summaries. The dataset should therefore be interpreted as a verified descriptive synthesis rather than the final global random-effects meta-analysis dataset.