The team tested seven types of gloves and discovered that clean-room nitrile gloves gave far fewer false positives than regular latex or nitrile ones: latex gloves could create up to 7,000 fake "microplastic" bits per square millimeter!
The researchers now recommend using clean-room gloves (or skipping gloves when possible) for more accurate results.
They've also developed new ways to tell glove particles apart from real microplastics, aiming for cleaner data going forward.