Sampling Location

In Melbourne, Australia the eight samples for the Dust Cloud Project have been sampled from Wednesday, 05.06. and Wednesday, 12.06. (4 working days, with a public holiday on Monday, 10.06). The sampling location has been parking lot of the Eurofins Campus in Dandenong South. The campus spans 3,000 m2 of lab space shared between Food Testing, BioPharma Testing, and Environment Testing. Over 110 staff members work on site, most commuting by car and using the adjacent parking lot.
The sampling site was selected at the end of the parking lot, away from a large tree and next to a path used exclusively by the Field team who drive past infrequently.
Dandenong South itself is, located 31 km south-east of Melbourne’s Central Business District, is primarily an industrial suburb. It has a close proximity to major highways leading out of the city and other busy roads. As this suburb is very industrial the roads are used by cars but also large trucks that transport manufactured goods. The Dandenong south is also 10 km away from the coast.

Weather conditions

The weather conditions during the sampling time have been cold and wintery with min temperatures ranging from 7 to 10 °C. There has been some rainfall on the last days of sampling and some winds with changing wind direction as shown below from the Commonwealth Bureau of Meteorology Moorabbin Airport (station 086077) as shown in the table.

Experts from the laboratories involved in the research have deployed in the open air at the same time, in urban environment, glass jars with a capacity of 2.5 L that were tinted to exclude algal growth and UV effects, each with a funnel of a given diameter, to collect mainly the sedimented dust and rainwater for a week.

A sample containing sufficient microplastics was collected in the vessels for the study over a time period defined on the basis of the literature. A funnel of standard diameter was needed to increase the collection surface area and to be able to compare the final results. Depending on the technique, the experts will determine the results in particles or mass/m2/day.

However, the sample is not the rainwater itself, but the settled dust, which can contain particles even smaller than 10 µm. The collected rainwater is first filtered from the sampling containers and then analyzed locally at the Eurofins laboratories participating in the study and in parallel by sending a sample each to the other participating laboratories.

The sediment filtered from the rainwater collected in the deployed containers is analyzed by the experts using different methods. At the Eurofins Knowledge Center in Budapest sample preparation is carried out by oxidation and density separation, and then the measurement is performed using all available techniques in the laboratory: FTIR, LDIR (Laser Direct Infrared), RAMAN, PYR-GC-MS, TED-GC-MS.

Of the samples collected in the containers placed in the courtyard of the Eurofins Knowledge Center, three are tested using this method.