No monitoring of microplastics in water column, sediments and biota is currently being conducted, mostly due to the lack of reliable, accessible and cost-effective methods for their detection and quantification. We are developing monitoring-applicable methods for sampling and analysis of microplastics in environmental samples, demonstrate their utility using regular samples from the
Baltic Sea, and recommend possible ways of microplastics monitoring integration into the Swedish National Monitoring Program (SNMP). In addition, we evaluate degrading capacity of bacterial communities inhabiting MPs and explore possibility of using community metrics to predict consequences MPs pollution for system in question.
