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Figure 11 Methodological issues historically led to a great underestimation of the total amount of textile fibers in the aquatic environment. Especially in the early days of micro- plastic research, most surface water samples were taken with neuston or manta nets, which are usually equipped with mesh sizes of 200-333 pm. Thus, items smaller than 200 ppm (like most microfibers), were considered to originate from external contamination and were intentionally excluded from the total microplastic counts. Subsequently, higher concentrations of microplastics (particles and fibers) started to be reported by those authors using smaller mesh sizes (S—50 pm) or bulk water sam- pling methods (Athey and Erdle 2022). Shortly after, more rigorous contamination control protocols and blank procedures started to be implemented and more widely adopted, and it soon became clear that these anthropogenic particles were particu- larly abundant in the marineenvironment (Figure 11.1).
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