Scientist Explores How New Tech Can Address Plastic Pollution

I first got into plastic pollution research when I was 19 years old when I was doing cleanup on a trail in India, and I felt really excited to see the trash removed and the environment coming back to life, which sparked all these ideas: What if we lived in a world without waste, with no trash in the environment? How does trash get into the environment, where does it go, and what sorts of harm does it cause? How can we prevent it? It’s been something that kept knocking on my mind.

This is one of the hot spots for plastic pollution. When it rains, you can see mattresses flowing down the rivers. There are just walls of trash coming down the river, and it goes out to the ocean, and it washes right up on the beach. Every single step I take on the beaches, I see microplastics in my footprint. That's an astounding amount of microplastic.

People should care about plastic in the environment because we are part of the environment. We can't separate ourselves from that. Anything we do to the environment is going to cause us harm as well.

The plastics problem is really ingrained in our culture in a huge way. It's coming from throwaway society, us wanting convenience, us wanting things immediately, cheaply.

There are already a lot of known plastic leachates that are dangerous. They pose the greatest health risks because they cross the blood-brain barrier and some can accumulate in our body tissues. For example, BPAs and phthalates found in common household goods—that end up in the trash—are a couple of different compounds that can harm our reproductive systems. There are thousands of these compounds, and some are proprietary and have never been documented. We choose to surround ourselves with these materials in what we use for eating, play, and work, so we are definitely exposing ourselves.

Well, they have toxicological mechanisms that are different than microplastics and macroplastics, and right now we don’t have any high-throughput—high-speed—techniques that we can use to analyze these particles. That’s what I’m hoping to develop, high-speed techniques can allow you to analyze a lot of samples in a short period of time, and that’s really critical for making real-time plastic analysis available and affordable to all.

If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. That's the reality. If we don't know how much microplastics we're being exposed to or the environment is being exposed to, then we won't be able to make any progress on microplastics or nanoplastics mitigation.

Open Specy is really catalyzing science. It’s a collaborative open-source project. Lots of scientists are working on it with me, and it’s allowing us to identify microplastics and their potential harm.

Sharing knowledge is one of the most powerful things that we can do, and open source is one way that we can share knowledge, tap into collective action, and improve upon the tool. Open Specy is shared with everybody. You can actually use the source code in new ways and do things beyond what we’re currently doing with it. And because it's freely available, it breaks down cost barriers. A lot of people from developing countries are using Open Specy who would not be able to afford this software or do research in their country without it. I want everybody to have the tools that they need to conduct science.

The Pew Charitable Trusts

When I was in graduate school, two technologies appeared: Raman and FTIR spectroscopy, which are very good at analyzing microplastics. They use light to detect microplastics and distinguish them from natural particles. But there was no freely open and available software that I could use to help interpret the data. So I decided to create my own. And I made it open source so that other people wouldn't have the same problem I did.

It allows scientists to contribute to building a robust reference library and improving the plastic pollution identification algorithms. The tool’s results can then be used to assess risks, study the sources of pollution, and see if interventions are reducing plastic pollution. I regularly lead workshops to help other researchers learn how to do this.

We don't think that it's only going to be our lab that will solve the plastic pollution problem. We're going to need hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people all working together to solve the problem completely.

Once we have information on what the threat is to the ocean and the amount of nanoplastics and leachates that are out there, we're going to be able to assess the risk. And then we can start trying to make some advances on the underlying sources of the issue. Where are these nanoplastics and leachates coming from? Are there safer alternatives? These questions require lots of data to find answers. And once we have them, then we can start to chip away at the problem.

I run an accredited lab—the only Environmental Lab Accreditation Program (ELAP) accredited nonprofit microplastic lab in the world—and we’re regularly getting asked to analyze nanoplastics and leachates, but we do not have the capability today. Support from the Pew-Gerstner fellowship is helping us create the techniques. It’s going to bring in a lot of collaboration, and the techniques we’re using will hopefully become new standards for others to use. Samples for nanoplastic and leachate are also much easier for people to collect than microplastic and macroplastic, so the potential for widespread regular monitoring is very high.