Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 686

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 34 of the 34 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Retention of microplastics in a major secondary wastewater treatment plant in Vancouver, Canada

Gies, Esther A., LeNoble, Jessica L., Noël, Marie, Etemadifar, Anahita, Bishay, Farida, Hall, Eric R., Ross, Peter S.·2018·Marine Pollution Bulletin

Abstract

Municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) are conduits through which microplastics (MPs) are released into aquatic environments. However, the technical challenges in working with wastewater sample matrices have precluded reliable particle count budget calculations. We applied newly-adapted methods for MP collection and analysis to a study of a major WWTP serving a population of 1.3 million people near Vancouver, Canada. Suspected MP particles, including fibres, were counted and categorized using light microscopy in influent, primary effluent, secondary effluent, primary sludge and secondary sludge. Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FT-IR) confirmed that just 32.4% of the suspected MPs were plastic polymers. Using FT-IR corrected data, we estimate that 1.76 ± 0.31 trillion MPs enter the WWTP annually, with 1.28 ± 0.54 trillion MPs settling into primary sludge, 0.36 ± 0.22 into secondary sludge, and 0.03 ± 0.01 trillion MPs released into the receiving environment. This corresponds to a retention of microplastics of up to 99% in the WWTP.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2018.06.006

Cites

34 of 34 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 34 references

Cited by

See all 686

Metadata

Authors
Gies, E. A., LeNoble, J. L., Noël, M., Etemadifar, A., Bishay, F., Hall, E. R., & Ross, P. S.
Venue
Marine Pollution Bulletin
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2018-08
Volume
133
Pages
553-561
ISSN
0025-326X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2809375183
Cited by
686
References
34
FWCI
17.28
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Retention of microplastics in a major secondary wastewater treatment plant in Vancouver, Canada. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2018.06.006
The paper
Gies, E. A., LeNoble, J. L., Noël, M., Etemadifar, A., Bishay, F., Hall, E. R., & Ross, P. S. (2018). Retention of microplastics in a major secondary wastewater treatment plant in Vancouver, Canada. Marine Pollution Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2018.06.006

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.