Plastic Pollutants in Aquatic Environment
Plastic debris has been identified in all aquatic compartments including oceans, estuaries, salt marshes, and terrestrial water. While decades of data exist on plastic debris in the marine environment, a holistic understanding of the sources, migration, and transformation of plastic waste across various eco-compartments is not yet available, partly due to the lack of high quality field data acquired using consistent methods and the difficulty in simulating natural plastic transformation in lab conditions within short to intermediate time scales. Our current focus is on developing three thrusts: i) developing laboratory protocols to analyze and quantify plastic contaminants in environmental matrices (i.e., water, air, soil/sediment), ii) collecting and analyzing crowd-sourced data to identify spatial and temporal trends of debris distribution, iii) designing laboratory methods to evaluate fragmentation and degradation behaviors and relate these findings with field observations.