Characteristics of water samples collected by UNIPER

The water samples collected by UNIPER during five rounds from 2021 to 2023, were characterized at the UPB laboratory for various physico-chemical parameters, microplastic detection, and nanoparticle profiling. The filtrates (liquid) resulting from cascade filtration were used to assess chloride content (g/L), salinity, electrical conductivity (EC) (mS/cm), pH, and total dissolved solids (TDS) (g/L). Microplastics retained on the metallic sieves were detected and measured by optical microscopy for their concentration, shape, and size. The size refers to the measured length of the detected microplastics during the first four sampling rounds (July 2021–December 2022), while the categorization by size classes (20 µm, 32 µm, 90 µm, and 125 µm) was carried out for those collected in July 2023. Additionally, nanoparticles in the filtrates (with particles less than 1000 µm) were evaluated using Nanoparticle Tracking Analysis (NTA) to determine nanoparticle concentration (particles/mL), mean size, and the percentage of particles under specific sizes (D10, D50, D90).