Lake Erie Foundation Continues Focus on Microplastics
Published: Monday, September 20, 2021
By: Peter Huston, Lake Erie Foundation Board Member
I can vividly remember the movie scene when a salesman whispers, “I have one word for you… plastics.” It was in the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” when young Ben Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is told, “There’s a great future in plastics.”
“Boy, did we blow it,” wrote Chemical Abstracts Service scientist Wendy Reichenbach in a recent letter to the Columbus Dispatch. “We’re on our way to being engulfed in plastic,” wrote Roger Kussow, a Geochemistry PHD from U of M Columbia, on the accumulation of plastics in our environment. They have a useful place in our daily lives, but the over-abundance of single-use plastics is creating a rapidly approaching but avoidable environmental crisis.
Thankfully we have people like Dr. Shari Mason advising us on the critical nature of microplastics. Dr. Mason is a professor of chemistry and a leading researcher in freshwater plastic pollution from Penn State Behrend College. Last year she consulted with students from Case Western Reserve University on a Lake Erie Foundation- (LEF) backed project focused on educating people about the dangers of microplastics.
The work of these students and Dr. Mason was incorporated into a video that explains the challenges and what each of us can do to be part of the solution. Please take some time to view the video on the LEF website.
In the video you’ll learn that we have only touched the surface on the complexity and under-told story of microplastics. It is in our drinking water and food supply, and is directly affecting our health. Surveys show there is a strong public interest in curbing our reliance on single-use plastics, however data indicates we are presently only recycling about 8% of plastics.
Learn more by visiting us at the “Shipwrecks and Scuba” symposium at Kalahari Resorts Sandusky on November 13 where you can hear a presentation by Dr. Shari Mason. You can also check the LEF website for information on how you can join our efforts to address this great challenge.
A version of this article appeared in the Fall Issue (September/October) 2021 of Great Lakes Scuttlebutt magazine.
tags: Environmental Impact, Events, Lake Erie
