Microplastic including tire wear particles in urban air measured in spider webs in Oldenburg, Germany, in 2020

This data set presents microplastic (MP) mass loads including tire wear particles (TWP) in spider webs collected from bus stops in a mid-sized German city. Spider webs were used as a spatial and temporal mirror of MP contamination in urban air. The analysis was conducted with pyrolysis-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (Py-GC/MS). Details concerning the measurements, quantification, and calibration are found in the related study (Goßmann et al., 2022). Spider webs were greatly contaminated with TWP, clusters of polyethylene-terephthalate (C-PET) and polyvinylchloride (C-PVC). Moreover, they provide insight into spatial differences and trends of MP/TWP load in local (urban) air on a small scale. While busy, stop and go dominated roads showed higher contamination of TWP, spider webs from residential areas were more often contaminated with MP other than TWP, predominantly C-PET. In some spider webs, MP accounted for up to ten percent of the total weight of the sample.