SYDNEY, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- An international consortium of researchers has developed a first-of-its-kind method that is affordable, portable and powerful in detecting harmful nanoplastic particles.

While microplastics are widely known, smaller nanoplastics pose greater risks as they infiltrate food, water, and even human organs, and have been difficult and costly to detect, according to a statement released Monday by Australia's University of Melbourne.

Researchers at the University of Melbourne and the University of Stuttgart in Germany have developed a novel "optical sieve" to cost-effectively detect, classify and count nanoplastic particles in real-world environments, the statement said.

The innovation exposes the vast, long-lasting nanoplastics pollution and provides hope for scalable monitoring of this global environmental and health crisis, said Lukas Wesemann from the University of Melbourne.

He said this breakthrough overcomes previous limitations of expensive, lab-bound scanning electron microscopes, making nanoplastic pollution monitoring scalable and accessible.

"Our novel optical sieve is an array of tiny cavities of varying sizes in a gallium arsenide microchip," Wesemann said, adding that when a liquid containing nanoplastics is poured over the sieve, each plastic particle is captured in a void of matching size, sorting them into categories down to a diameter of 200 nanometers.

Detection and counting are possible using only an optical microscope and a basic camera by observing color changes caused by the particles, according to the study published in Nature Photonics.

"Understanding the numbers and size distribution of nanoplastics is crucial to assess their impact on global health, and aquatic and soil ecosystems," said University of Melbourne Associate Professor Brad Clarke, the study's co-author.

The technique has been validated using lake water mixed with nanoplastics, with plans to extend testing to blood samples, researchers said. The team is working to commercialize the technology for environmental monitoring. ■