In a Long Beach shopping center near where the San Gabriel River empties into Alamitos Bay, researchers, educators and activists are stepping up the fight against plastics pollution.
The headquarters for the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research is small, but it brings together a refill store, BYO Long Beach, with offices tucked behind it, a classroom and a state-of-the-art lab. Inside the lab, researchers engage in a multistep process that involves sieves, chemicals, a large scanner and open-source software developed in-house to identify microplastics in anything from water to air. As of Sept. 1, the lab was among the world’s first to be certified to analyze microplastics in drinking water.
“We want everybody to be able to understand their risk of microplastics and be able to determine whether or not we’re improving the situation,” says Win Cowger, research director for Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research.
But, in order to do that, lab technician Andrea Amend adds, “we need to know where it is and in what quantities.”
The conversation about plastics pollution has changed a lot in the past 30 years. Back in the 1990s and ’00s, even into the early 2010s, the emphasis was on the plastic we could see — grocery bags, plastic straws, etc. — and the harm it caused wildlife in and around the ocean. Over the course of the past decade, though, the focus has shifted to microplastics — particles that can be small enough to go unnoticed as they disperse across land, sea and air.
Scientists have found microplastics in our food and our bodies. Recently, a study from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque found evidence of microplastics in the human brain. Scientists are only beginning to study the impact of microplastics on human health, but, to get a better idea of the scale of the issue, you need to know where the microplastics are. That’s where Moore Institute of Plastic Pollution Research, an offshoot of 30-year-old environmental organization Algalita, comes into the picture.
Founded in 1994 by Captain Charles Moore, Algalita was initially designed to study and restore kelp forests. (In fact, the name is derived from “alga,” the Spanish word for seaweed.) A few years later, though, the mission changed when Moore spotted plastic litter in the ocean while sailing from Hawaii to California. Heading into the new century, Algalita became one of the major voices raising awareness on what would be popularly known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Algalita dived into researching plastics pollution in the ocean and, as word of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch spread, young people wanted to learn more and get involved. Katie Allen, Algalita’s executive director, recalls near-daily phone calls from students, teachers and parents back when she started with the organization in 2010. She started sending out “simple teaching kits” to classrooms.
“Today, we have a flourishing international program with students from more than half the world’s countries participating in them,” says Allen.
In some respects, it’s been easier to engage people in plastics pollution issues than other environmental issues because so much of the problem is visible. You don’t have to be a scientist to see trash clogging gutters or strewn across beaches and recognize that it shouldn’t be there.
“I prefer to work in plastics because you can actually see it,” says Allen. “There are so many people who are climate deniers in part because you can’t really see it the way that you can see plastics.”
Still, there has been misinformation that Algalita’s educators needed to address, such as what exactly is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
“What happened was that, in using that terminology and the media really grasping hold of this, it almost created this tangible vision in people’s minds that there was a huge island out there, which isn’t true,” says Allen.
“If there was any pushback, it was more along the lines of re-educating people that this isn’t some huge plastic island,” she continues. “This is something that’s much harder to imagine, but it’s more like a plastic soup. When it comes to the severity, people can see it.”
And, at Algalita, there are samples on hand to view. I look at a jar filled with contents collected in the North Pacific Gyre 10 years ago. It does look like a soup, albeit one filled with rope and shards of plastic instead of noodles and vegetables.
Inside BYO Long Beach, where customers cut down on plastics by refilling jars with products like laundry powder and Castile soap, there are display cases filled with items found on beach cleanups. A Fritos corn chips bag from 1970 turned up during a 2018 cleanup. There also was a lid labeled “certified compostable,” but, as the label points out, that can only happen in an industrial compost facility. (The EPA states that plastics labeled as compostable need to be able to break down at a composting facility, adding: “There are currently no ASTM standard test methods in place for evaluating the ability of a plastic to compost in a home environment.”)
Beyond consumer-level plastics found along waterways, there are nurdles, tiny plastic pellets used in production processes. Back in the lab, Cowger shows me a vial filled with the small, round nurdles in varying colors found during a Southern California beach cleanup. This kind of trash can only come from industrial dumping, he says. Nurdles, which are considered microplastics, aren’t consumer products. They’re also one of the most common types of pollutants found along our beaches.
“This data can drive a solution,” Cowger says. “If I can tell you I’m confident that 50 percent of the plastic on the beaches is coming from industrial dumping, we have a target.”
About seven years ago, Cowger began researching microplastics and encountered a problem. The analysis software available was very expensive and not very good. So, he made his own, called Open Specy, and made it open source. Now, other researchers are using Open Specy as well. “Other academic papers are citing it, about 100 every year,” he says.
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On top of that, the Moore Institute has a specialized scanner-like machine used for particle analysis that microplastic researchers need, but many labs lack. With that in mind, they’ve opened up the lab to students. On the day I visited, a PhD student from UC Riverside was using the machine for her research. “Really, without this instrument, they wouldn’t be able to do their research,” says Cowger.
It’s one of the most advanced machines available, which is necessary as the lab tries to ramp up the process of analyzing samples for microplastics. Where once it took about a week to process one sample, now the lab is able to do it in about three days.
“We think that we may even be able to bring it down within the next couple years to a single day,” he says. That’s crucial in light of California’s efforts to test drinking water for microplastics.
As Algalita continues to educate the public on plastics pollution, Moore Institute’s lab will be there to help provide a fuller picture.
“That’s one of the major contributions of our current research right now, using this device to do high throughput work,” says Cowger. “It allows research labs to scale really quickly. They can collect lots of samples, analyze lots of data and that increases our confidence in our results. The main application of that is that municipalities will be able to respond faster and more confidently.”