Lab Gloves Inflate Microplastic Counts Through Stearates

Researchers at the University of Michigan report in a March 2026 RSC Analytical Methods paper that stearate salts shed from common latex and nitrile lab gloves can create thousands of false-positive microplastic detections per square millimeter during vibrational (Raman) spectroscopy. They tested seven glove types, found latex worst (≈7,000 false positives/sq-mm) and recommend cleanroom or no-glove protocols plus ML-based conformal prediction to correct contaminated datasets.