**2. Methods**

A literature review was conducted of papers published up to 2021, which were identified by the Scopus search engine. The search terms were: Risk assessment AND Water OR Waters OR Estuarine OR Surface OR River OR Ocean OR Marine OR Lake AND Microplastics OR Microplastic on the article title. A total of 14 articles matched this search strategy, from which four were excluded because even though they identified MPs in water bodies, they carried out the ERA only for other pollutants (e.g., heavy metals), performed MPs measurements in sediments that were excluded from this review or were Reviews of toxicological articles. The eight selected articles were analyzed and scored based on the criteria observed in **Table 1**.


**Table 1.**

*Criteria to score the environmental risk analysis for MPs selected.*

The ERA criteria observed on the first two columns of **Table 1** were based on the articles made by Refs. [3, 4, 7], and the quality assurance column was based on the article made by Koelmans et al. [6]. Both the ERA criteria and the quality controls carried out in the experimental part of the article are considered for this review, as quality is the basis of good data collection and reporting how the experiment is performed is key to reproducibility and future standardization of methods.

The scores given to each criterion are:

	- One point will be assigned to each specified detection limit (one for size limit, one for shape limit, and one for polymer type limit) and one for each section of the experiment (one for sampling limit, one for separation limit, and one for identification limit).
	- In addition to the criteria established by Koelmans et al. [6], the detection limits must be specified to be able to interpret the results more accurately.
