The Longevity of Waste in the Environment

This week started the summer season, which means I get to spend more time at the lab and moving back and forth between extracting microplastics from samples and making slides of nematodes for identification. Yesterday, as I was counting nematodes and making slides, I noticed some oddities in the samples, shown in the pictures here. The first oddity appears to be plastic--it is clear, non-uniform in structure, and rather durable. It is harder to definitively identify clear items as plastics, due to the salts that I use in my research, but the sample came from one of the polluted areas, suggesting that it may be plastic. The second item is polystyrene (styrofoam), but what is surprising is how small the item is. The size of material that I am sorting through to remove nematodes is 63-500 micrometers, or 0.063-0.500 millimeters, which means that this styrofoam is incredibly small.

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