New UMaine Facility Will Map Microplastics in Maine’s Water, Seafood and Soil

Knowing where microplastics turn up starts with having the right instrument. The University of Maine announced on October 1, 2026 that it is building a microplastics instrumentation facility to help scientists, industries and communities across Maine detect and measure microplastics in seafood, drinking water, soil and air.

The facility is funded by a three-year National Science Foundation grant under NSF’s Major Research Instrumentation program. The award began August 1, 2026 and is expected to run through July 2029, according to UMaine.

What the facility will do

• Map where microplastics are found in Maine, measure their concentrations and flag places where more monitoring may be needed.
• Open access beyond one lab. UMaine says nearly 30 prospective users and partners have expressed interest. They include UMaine researchers and its Darling Marine Center, private businesses, aquaculture and fishing interests, and environmental groups concerned about contamination in local waterways and food.
• Study how particles move and interact. Researchers plan to look at how microplastics travel through the environment, how people may be exposed through food, water and air, and how the particles interact with other contaminants, including PFAS, metals and pathogens.
• Share results publicly, eventually. The team hopes findings could be made available so Mainers can see where microplastics are being detected and where monitoring gaps remain.

The instrument: why FTIR imaging matters

The facility is built around a Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) microscope. It can automatically scan relatively large areas of a sample filter and identify microplastics by their chemical composition. Each polymer absorbs infrared light in its own pattern, so the instrument can tell one plastic from another, and plastic from natural material.

That matters because, as UMaine notes, older methods often require scientists to examine suspected plastic particles one at a time. Automated scanning lets researchers analyze samples more efficiently and produce much larger datasets. Larger, comparable datasets are exactly what the field has lacked when it comes to answering “how much, and where?”

UMaine says it currently lacks comparable microplastics instrumentation and that similar equipment is rare elsewhere in Maine. The microscope is expected to arrive early next year. Postdoctoral researcher Mariusz Potocki is expected to operate it and oversee much of the sample analysis.

Who is involved

The principal investigator is distinguished professor Paul Mayewski, former director of UMaine’s Climate Change Institute. Co-principal investigators are Margaret Estapa (associate professor of oceanography) and Mariusz Potocki. Collaborators include chemistry professor Carl Tripp and Onur Apul, now at Penn State.

“The goal here is to provide a microplastics instrumentation facility for UMaine, the University of Maine System, the state and beyond,” Mayewski said in the UMaine release.

What it does — and doesn’t — mean yet

This is an instrumentation and monitoring announcement, not a set of results. No Maine microplastics concentrations have been published from the facility yet. The instrument hasn’t arrived, and building a statewide picture will depend on collecting samples from enough places over time. As Mayewski put it: “Without monitoring in the environment, we wouldn’t understand a lot about what we do now with respect to what impacts and doesn’t impact our health.”

For water professionals and curious readers alike, the takeaway is simple. Better, faster particle identification is how monitoring moves from scattered snapshots to maps that communities can actually use.

A note on scope: this post summarises a university news release. It reports no measurements and makes no health finding. Hydrology University was not involved in the project.

Sources

• University of Maine Climate Change Institute, “New UMaine facility to help Maine track microplastics in seafood, water and soil (Mayewski, Potocki),” October 1, 2026: climatechange.umaine.edu
• National Science Foundation, Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program: nsf.gov MRI program

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