On an overcast Saturday in Seattle, a group of volunteers combs a small section of the beach at Golden Gardens Park for trash. With 5-gallon buckets in hand, they slowly fan out and search a roughly rectangular zone marked by cones, passing over the same spots several times from the grass to the waterline as they look for even the tiniest things that don’t belong there.
Unlike several other Earth Day weekend cleanups going on farther down the beach, this group has been given special instructions that will help them categorize and log everything they find, from food scraps and toys to tiny pieces of foil and, of course, many types of plastic. From large pieces, such as bottles, cups, and even a Smurf action figure, to tiny microplastics — fragments, films, fibers, or foams less than 5 mm long — plastic is one of the most common pollutants this group will find, mirroring what cleanup crews regularly see across the country. Recently, international attention has homed in on the problem, which is only growing worse as plastic doesn’t decompose but degrades into smaller pieces that will remain in the environment for thousands of years. Single-use plastics will be phased out of national parks by 2032 after an announcement in June from the Biden administration, and by the end of 2024, the United Nations plans to have a legally binding plan to end plastic pollution globally. But groups like this cleanup crew are helping answer a more basic question: Where is this stuff coming from? These volunteers are following the “Escaped Trash Assessment Protocol,” which was developed in Washington state from 2018 to 2021 and is now being used by volunteer groups around the country with guidance from the Environmental Protection Agency. The idea is to provide standardized data to state and local regulators so they can better attack sources of pollution. “We’re doing the same thing at different sites all around the state to see: what does litter look like here versus near a highway versus an alley versus another beach?” explains Heather Trim, executive director of Zero Waste Washington, an organization that helped develop the protocol. Using geographic pins on her phone, she marks the location of the cones around the perimeter of the cleanup area, which will enable her to map it later. “The data they’re going to collect is going to be apples to apples” between the sites. Even though the City of Seattle already cleaned this beach of large debris hours before people started arriving at the popular park, the 20 or so volunteers working with Puget Soundkeeper end up filling buckets with trash. Volunteers Valerie Chu and David Corrado sit on the grass to sort the material into trays after helping gather litter from the beach. Other volunteers take the trays to tables set up under a canopy to be divided even more specifically into plastic containers with detailed labels. Is the trash from camping? Is it from fishing gear? Is it a household item? Is it dog waste? There’s a quart-sized container for basically any item you could find, with dozens of possible categories. Some of the youngest volunteers then help count the number of items in each container, weigh the trash from that category, and dictate their findings to the recordkeeper. As expected, plastic is one of the most common substances across the categories. Chu, who works in toxicology in the Seattle area and regularly volunteers with Puget Soundkeeper, says she’s keenly aware of the issues plastic can pose in the environment. “When it comes to microplastics, a lot of times contaminants [attach] onto these microfibers from clothing,” Chu explains. “When it comes to all those contaminants, there’s very little research to show what makes things more toxic.” Essentially, chemicals that already pollute the environment, such as PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, and flame retardants, can glom onto the plastic and convert into other more toxic substances, she says. But little is known about the impacts those combinations may have on people, wildlife, and the environment. While the fibers the volunteers find on the beach are mostly too large to be categorized as microplastics, some of these materials could ultimately break down to that size. And although groups like this conduct cleanups around the country every day, they are starting to direct their attention away from the end life of plastic to focus on the beginning. If anything is going to change, they say, plastic production and packaging choices around the world need to shift. “It would be good for more people to know about the beginning of life of plastic and the role that these large corporations have in it,” says Gillian Flippo, the stewardship coordinator for Puget Soundkeeper, who helps run cleanups and citizen science projects throughout the year. “This data will be going toward larger scale change, the bigger picture, and hopefully that’ll potentially inform some policy.” People should be focusing on “turning off this plastic tap,” she says. The reality of how pervasive plastic pollution has become around the world is staggering. Whether testing guts or muscle tissue in the lab from a fish, a crustacean, a mammal, or a person, scientists have found plastic inside essentially all living things. Plastic pollution has been found even in the most pristine areas, including the deepest part of the ocean and the most isolated mountaintops. Marine debris and plastic bags found along rivers are visible reminders that plastic is in the waters we rely on, but it’s also most likely coming out of your water tap at home. Highway litter is an obvious sign the land is contaminated with plastic, and now ice and snow samples at remote locations on the planet, including in the Arctic, have been shown to contain plastic, suggesting it’s traveling through the very air we breathe. As researchers and citizen scientists point out, this isn’t just a problem created by plastic straws and beverage bottles. It’s not just single-use plastic bags, or plastic cutlery, or the increasing amount of plastic film being used to keep our fruits, vegetables, and other foods fresh. Microplastics have been found in beer, honey, broccoli, meat, fish — people and living creatures everywhere are unavoidably consuming the stuff. But panic campaigns on foods to avoid would be ineffective. “What we’re trying to understand is, where is the plastic coming from?” says Professor Elise Granek, an expert in coastal marine ecology at Portland State University, who leads the Applied Coastal Ecology lab there. “Without a handle on where it’s coming from, it’s really hard to make recommendations for management and policy.” Luckily, with a rising interest in microplastics research over the last decade, scientists are starting to understand the sources and what can be done to stop them.Granek (along with colleagues at other universities and her students) has helped advance our understanding of plastic pollution.
In a project with Oregon Public Broadcasting, one of her students helped the public radio station sample rivers around the Portland area, including tests near their headwaters in fairly remote areas. They tested sites on the Willamette, Rogue, and Deschutes rivers. “We found microplastics everywhere,” Granek says. The amount of plastic found was lowest in the most remote areas and higher near urban centers. “It makes sense that there was a correlation with population density, but nowhere was pristine,” Granek says. Plenty of research has focused on the microplastics found in the guts of fish and seafood, to better understand how that may be taken up through their digestion process. But in another project, Granek and others looked at fillets from common fish found at markets. Microplastics were found in the tissue that people actually eat, she says. “What’s happening is, we actually find fairly long fibers even in the muscle tissue of the organisms,” Granek says. “Those long fibers are very, very thin, on the order of 20 microns in width, but they can be a millimeter in length.” But that doesn’t mean she wants to dissuade people from eating seafood, which is a great source of healthy protein. “It’s not like you should avoid this, because you’re getting [microplastics] from other sources,” as well, Granek says. This summer, her lab will use a grid system to study parts of Portland. By looking for tiny plastics deposited in moss, which is abundant throughout the city, they’ll try to get a sense of some of the hot spots for plastic pollution. Plastic particles that wear off tires are one of the most common sources of that pollution. So, the researchers expect highways and freeways to be a big source. “We think the recycling center in north Portland is probably a source, because some gets dropped or weathered,” Granek says. “We know a number of studies have found dryer vents release microfibers … so we’re wondering if laundry facilities are higher sources.” The most common type of microplastic found anywhere is the microfiber. They commonly shed off of plastic clothing such as polyester and nylon during the wash cycle, and while wastewater treatment plants may capture about 90 percent of those fibers, about 10 percent still escape into effluent. Even more of those microfibers may end up in the environment if biosolids captured at the treatment plant are used in agricultural fertilizing practices. Those same microfibers are also released into the air through dryer vents. Using dryers at residential homes in Idaho and Vermont, researchers took bright pink blankets, got them wet and placed them in the dryer on low for an hour. They found the hot pink fibers in surface snow samples up to 30 feet away from the vents, with more than a thousand fibers found in some of the test spots. Think about what that means for how many microfibers Portland or Seattle put out into the environment, Granek says. There are likely millions released into the environment every single day. One solution governments are considering is requiring special filters on dryers to capture most of those microfibers at the source. Though the fibers may end up in landfills when those filters are disposed of and replaced, at least they won’t be released into the air.About two-and-a-half hours southwest of Portland, other groundbreaking microplastics research is underway at Oregon State University’s Hatfield Marine Science Center, located in Newport on the Oregon Coast.
In early May, Associate Professor Susanne Brander walks through the university’s brand new microplastics lab completed during the pandemic. Brander teaches in the Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences and Environmental and Molecular Toxicology departments, and helps mentor students whose work touches on plastic research in diverse ways. With her for this May tour is a team of graduate students who will spend this summer researching microplastics in tiny shrimp, bioluminescent fish, animal waste, and more. The team collaborates with government agencies and universities around the country, as they have a special piece of equipment to identify the type of plastic each tiny particle is made of. While many labs have had Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy machines for years, this lab has a micro-FTIR that can analyze micro- and nanoplastics mere microns in length. (A micron is just 1/25,000 of an inch, or one-millionth of a meter.) In the lab’s clean room, where special hoods and HEPA filters keep the area clear of as many background contaminants as possible, lab technician Emily Pedersen puts a plastic sample under what looks like a microscope. The micro-FTIR passes infrared radiation through the particles and takes several scans as a computer creates a wavelength showing how much light was absorbed or reflected. “It reads the wavelengths that are coming back and compares it to a known library,” Pedersen says, noting that many labs helped create the library by scanning known substances into the system. “So, that’s just polyethylene terephthalate, which is a regular water bottle or packaging.” For this demonstration, she already knew the material came from a water bottle, but when the team is running tests on various microplastics found in animal samples, the machine is key to understanding what’s there. It also helps sort out natural fibers and organic material from man-made substances. “If you’re pulling a bunch of different fibers from a fish gut, it’s really hard to tell if they’re synthetic or not unless you chemically analyze them,” Brander says.