How Clean is the Environment?

The question for this week's blog (albeit a bit late) is much of the focus of my research. We know that humans are the only organisms that actively destroy their environments, even at the cost of their own self preservation, but at the same time we have not yet quantified environmental health across the globe. The St. Andrews Bay system, which is the site of my current microplastics research, is exceptionally understudied, though it is a densely populated coastal system in Florida. Because of the scarcity of research and published data from the St. Andrews Bay system, I have made strong claims about the cleanliness of parts of the bay system, which I need to support with data. Specifically, I need to use areas that I know the environmental health of and compare samples from those areas to the non-polluted bay areas that I have claimed are clean.

Realistically it is challenging to find an area that is an exact match of the St. Andrews Bay waterway and sediments, but since my concern is the microplastics pollution in the Bay, I have decided to use two areas off the coast of the FSU marine lab, where I do my sample processing and analysis. I run all of the marine lab samples through the same procedure as the St. Andrews Bay samples, and (once finished) compare the abundances of microplastics to those in St. Andrews Bay. If there are no differences between the abundances in the two systems, and if the variances are tight around the mean abundances, then I can feel confident in claiming that the non-polluted sites in St. Andrews Bay are clean with regards to microplastics pollution.

This week I have been extracting microplastics from the marine lab samples, running the samples through the Fenton reaction, and identifying microplastics under the microscope. The image here is an example of a sub-section of a single marine lab sample. There are no visible plastics in this specific image, but you can see some droplets on the filter paper and crystals from the chemical reaction that happened. Up close the filter paper looks really similar to microfibers, since the filter paper is made of cellulose, so I move slowly through the sample to evaluate all potential microparticles. Importantly, I do all of this work wearing cotton clothing so that fibers from my clothes do not contaminate the samples. Even if I were to identify a potential microfiber in the visual identification step, I still have to process the samples using Raman spectroscopy, which allows me to confirm the identity of true microplastics.

The next few weeks should be really exciting weeks based on some things that are up-and-coming, so stay tuned!

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