Nanoplastic detection with surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy: Present and future

Despite the growing interest in nanoplastics (NPs), detection techniques are very limited. In microplastics (MP) analysis, vibrational spectroscopy such as FTIR (size limit 20 μm) and Raman (size limit 1 μm) are widely used because they are non-destructive and provide unique molecular fingerprints. However, in the case of NPs which have small volume, it is considered that normal Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is not suitable for detecting NPs due to the intrinsic low scattering cross-section. Therefore, there have been attempts to apply surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy to the analysis of nanoplastics. So far, a total of 12 studies (as of November 21, 2022) have been published. Despite the expectation that SERS will be suitable for the analysis of NPs, there are still many limitations. At this point, we briefly summarize the research so far, and discuss the advantages, current limitations, critical aspects, and perspectives in field of nanoplastic detection using SERS.