The extraction of wastewater MPs was carried out according to the methods described above.

Briefly, each 10L sample was mixed with Fenton’s reagent and left to incubate at room
temperature overnight. Influent (S1) and degritted treated wastewater (S2) were treated with 360
mL of Fenton’s reagent, while WAS (S3) required 720mL of digestive agent. Following incubation,
the samples were filtered through decreasing sized sieves (2 mm, 1 mm, 500 µm, 250 µm,125 µm,
53 µm, 38 µm) to separate MPs into distinct size classes and stained with 218 Rose Bengal to
differentiate biological materials. The remaining filtrate (

A method validation experiment was initially performed to test the recovery of different plastic
polymers from wastewater. Under a clean fume hood in pre-rinsed glass jars, triplicate 1L samples
of influent, WAS and effluent were spiked with 10 MP pellets each of PVC, PP and low density PE
(LDPE) ranging 2 - 4 mm in size, and 1 g of commercial facial scrub. The facial scrub (hereafter
referred to as a personal care product, or PCP) was previously extracted or microbeads using a
modified version of a previous method (Hernandez et al. 2017), to determine the number of MP
particles per gram. A subset of microbeads were placed on double-sided carbon tape, coated with
a thin film of platinum and imaged using a Zeiss Sigma VP field emission scanning electron
microscope (SEM) operated at 20 keV in backscatter mode to determine the size, shape and
surface appearance. The influent and effluent samples were digested using ~40 mL of Fenton’s
reagent (0.05 M FeSO4.7H2O and 30% H2O2) at 70 ͦ C for 30 minutes. This temperature was
chosen to ensure maximum digestion efficiency while being careful to not to exceed the COT of
the model plastic types. Approximately double the volume of Fenton’s reagent was required to
digest WAS samples were due to the high organic matter content. Following digestion, samples
were filtered through a series of stainless steel sieves to determine particle recovery rates; 2 mm,
1 mm and 250 µm (Endecott). Smaller sized sieves were not required in the validation study as
the minimum particle size was 387 µm (determined by SEM) for microbeads from PCPs. Rose
Bengal solution (0.2 mg/mL) was applied to each sieve and allowed to stain for five minutes at
room temperature, before being gently rinsed with Milli-Q water. Similar particles or beads that
were present in the background samples were first examined, then deducted when calculating
the recovery rate. The recovery rates for PVC, PP and LDPE pellets and PE microbeads were
calculated using the following formula: Microplastic recovery rate % = - !"# !$% - !"# #&% ' (-#-
(-#-"# x 100 To determine the recovery efficiency for smaller plastic particles in the micrometer
size range, it was necessary to substitute Milli-Q water for wastewater to prevent background
interference from small MPs present in wastewater samples. Briefly, the model LDPE pellets were
ground to a fine powder using an electric blender and sieved through 1 mm, 250 µm, 63 µm metal
sieves to obtain the lower size fraction. Particles that passed through the 63 µm sieve were
collected and sorted under a stereomicroscope. Triplicate samples containing one hundred