URI Looks to Tackle Mounting Plastic Pollution with Land-to-Sea Solutions
By CAITLIN FAULDS/ecoRI News staff
Plastic waste in and around the West River in Providence highlights the problem at hand. (Alden Leso)
Once upon a time,
plastic was a miracle material.
When early polymers were
discovered in the late
19th century, they were seen as modern, innovative, pliable, and functional.
The material, which would be developed into fully synthetic plastic in the
1900s, was heralded as a substitute for ivory, for stone and horn, for wood and
metal. A material to save the environment, an equalizer of sorts, and the tool
to launch the United States into an era of vast mass production and newly
accessible material wealth.
Plastics were
extraordinarily useful. But, as Judith Swift, director of the University of
Rhode Island’s Coastal Institute, puts it, “the problem is
that … we had no idea at the time just how extraordinary it would be.”
More than a century
later, Swift noted “we have no choice” but to address the problem. Plastics
today are found in the world’s most isolated places, most remote corners.
They are ingested by species around the world, including humans. Each week, the
average person around the globe consumes about a credit card’s worth of
plastic, a 2019 study suggested.
“It’s run amok,” Swift
said, plainly. “If we’re reaching a point where we’re actually ingesting
plastic what possible choice do we have other than to address it.”
But there is no easy
solution that will make plastics disappear.
“It’s complex in the fact that you and I can’t walk into a drugstore without buying plastic,” Swift said. “We can’t buy groceries without buying plastic. We can’t buy clothing without buying plastic. We can’t do any of these things.”
Plastic is the “only
choice that’s being presented” to consumers, according to Swift. It has become
so ingrained in society that there is no substantial alternative, no choice in
the matter. This material entanglement on nearly every front means it is
difficult to extricate the modern world from the problem.
It will take
collaboration, innovation anew to solve the environmental and public-health
problems being caused by the world’s overreliance on plastics. A new
university-wide research network at URI hopes to do just that.
The Plastics:
Land to Sea platform — a public-facing co-laboratories initiative and
the “brainchild” of URI vice president of research Peter Snyder, according to
Swift — will bring together nearly 30 interdisciplinary researchers to think
holistically about the problematic polymer.
The endeavor features
engineers, textile designers, economists, communicators, and biomedical and
environmental scientists — “it’s literally a small army of individuals who are
being gathered together to exchange ideas with each other,” Swift said.
Together with nonprofits, other academic institutions, corporate partners, and
government agencies, the initiative will try to figure out how to pull off one
of the world’s greatest disappearing acts: drastically reducing global plastics
pollution.
Images detailing the immensity of the plastics problem have long circulated, like those of the infamous Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But Arijit Bose, a chemical engineering professor involved in the network, said that is just the “tip of the plastic-berg.”
Small plastic particles — between 100 nanometers to
about 10 microns in diameter — have worked their way into water columns, he
said, infiltrating the seas and being ingested into all sorts of marine life.
Bose studies the ways
these microplastics interact with the smallest of marine life, bacteria, which
are about 1 micron in diameter. He and his research team have discovered that
when these bacteria encounter plastic nanoparticles, they bind to them. They
try to “degrade the plastic or use the plastic as some kind of food,” he said.
“It’s very interesting,”
Bose said, “because the implication for that is that maybe, maybe … the story’s
not complete when we say we’re just dumping plastic and it stays in there
forever and ever.”
Bose said he has long
drawn on the expertise of other departments to figure out how plastics
circulate in the ocean, the size of plastics observed in the water, and the
chemistry of the plastic there — “all those things make a difference to our
work.”
Formalizing and
extending this collaboration through the research platform will help address
the multifaceted, human-scale issue at hand, according to Bose.
“If research is done in
silos, scientists may come up with potential solutions that work in a
biological sense, but will not resonate with communities or decision-makers,”
said Emily Diamond, assistant professor in URI’s Department of Communication
Studies and Marine Affairs.
Interdisciplinary
collaboration, she said, can allow for solutions that are “not only
scientifically sound, but effective in society as well.”
Across campus in the
Department of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics, assistant professor
Pengfei Liu agreed.
“Economics cannot tell
you how the plastic will affect the local marine ecosystem, right?” he said.
“So, you need to rely on others and use the knowledge in other fields.”
His research focuses on
how people value environmental amenities and resources, and the externalities
imposed on those unattached to a line of production or consumption. With
plastic, as with other resources and commodities, one person’s choices impact
the welfare of others.
To solve this, market
forces will play a hand, but Liu is adamant that education is key — that people
will reduce their plastic consumption “not because it is expensive, but because
they feel it is the right thing to do.”
For Swift, plastic has
proved its value again and again — especially over the course of the pandemic.
How could the world have coped without it, without the syringes, masks, nasal
swabs, and vaccine packaging so crucial to COVID-19 response, she wondered.
There is a reason plastic is so prevalent, there’s a reason it was seen as a
“miraculous substance,” she said. But she is hopeful the URI initiative will
help uproot that reliance.
“Plastic is the ideal
thing,” Swift said. “But we’ve got to figure out some way to either develop it
differently or to deal with the degrading process of it and the disposal of it
in a way that isn’t going to be problematic.”
