Suckling who did her undergraduate bachelor's and master's work at Bangor University in the UK. And continued on with some interesting international Agriculture adventures and then worked for awhile at the Scott Association for marine science. And then took on a PhD through the British Antarctic Survey and Cambridge University. And then went off back to Bangor and did a post-doc as well as lecture ship. And then in 2018 moved to an assistant professor position and Sustainable Agriculture and the Department of Fisheries, animal and veterinary science at the University of Rhode Island, where she's doing really interesting eco physiological work, among other things with microplastics. And so that is, that is where she'll she'll talk to us today. And so I'll turn it over to you for calling. Thank you for that great introduction and thanks for the opportunity to speak of your community today, I'm really excited to see some new faces, even if it's factual, It's always my snap it back into a conversational environment and start connecting more research. I'd say just give me a second. I'm just going to share my screen. So you can see your slide. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. Great. Yes. I'm really excited to be here today to talk to you about assessing the presence and impacts all green plastic pollution. This is one that I hold as a reset shall I do many different components like looking at climate change, sustainability and animals and acclimation capabilities. Where I work with a lot of like farmers in the air and I'm helping the grief of the sea urchin industry, which is why I don't see actually here it's kinda my signature kind of like label. And I have about a rather fun play on my lab name called the kind of lab. Not you because I have a terrible name and I don't want this duckling lab, so we get the kinda NetLab and students seem to enjoy that kind of name that. But yes, if the hats I'm talking today about is assessed impacts on marine plastic pollution because there is a kind of intermix here about concerns about how industry is going to be. I'm facing problems with plastic pollution and our ecosystems in general. And this is an area that I started working on with undergraduates when I was at binding university as a lecturer back in about 20, we started working about 2014, 2015. And it's an easy opportunity really having come to the University of Rhode Island and the wide variety of funding agency support that I've been very grateful to receive, to help support and generate my start talking my lab in the University of Rhode Island. I'm going to call it Yoda voice, just as a quick reference. But what I've done is I've invested heavily into creating clean room facilities in my lab so that we can work with very small size fractions of microplastics. And I'll talk a bit more about what that looks like down the line for those of you who are less familiar with this fields. But also we have great, you will to recycle kind of aquarium facilities where we can manipulate any kind of condition on days with microplastics and stimulate that with single and multiple stresses, the climate change. So we have some tremendous facilities to be able to, we understand and I'm through different conditions or animals to really figure out how they're responding to these different environmental challenges. Say something I wanted to kind of bring to your attention really is one of what is it that your eyes up to you in terms of microplastics? Because we do have a university-wide effort in times of like our investment in trying to tackle this kind of global scale marine pollution issue. So URIs dedicated to addressing the issue of microplastics. And we highlighted this recently going on as colloquium, which we call sustaining our shores. And I was involved in handling some of the sessions which looks specifically at plastic pollution, is that as one of those issues? And there's some links. Thank you. Okay. Chat. I'm happy to share these with the coordinated afterwards to share with you beyond tool if you want to access any of this. But we have We had we had Chelsea recommend you use one of the leading experts, marine plastic pushing come and talk to the community, Rhode Island, about where we started tens of international national level research depletion. And we've got some panel discussions as well about national, regional levels of the discourse surrounding plastic pollution. So if you're interested to learn more, these are great links to go to. And also has been investing heavily into working towards solutions towards plastics. So we have this plastic Philanthropy Initiative which just started just prior to the pandemic. So we've had some delays in getting that going and now we're, we're kind of reinvesting the energy now that we're kind of coming out the other side of the, the kind of global pandemic and starting to kind of network again and establish our research programs. And it's called the Collaborative lab or for short. And this is really being Tompkins by approve vice chancellor of research Peter Snyder. And the goal of this is ready to bring multiple researchers to address a grand environmental challenge, a challenge across multiple sectors. So we're focused on plastic pollution here, looking at material science and sustainability. And we're asking a lot of questions about product selection, index materials. So we're going to see a lot of research papers coming out from the URI moving forward. Over the next few years from this initiative. And what are the goals that we're trying to do is bring researchers and communities together. And this is not just in Rhode Island, this is like nationally and internationally as well, to work toward solution-based science. So we're working on things like textiles was an interesting kind of textile history have in Rhode Island, which is affecting the bullshit watershed area. We have a lot of textiles experts as well. You're looking at these problems. And we're developing tools that we can work with some of these issues and looking at behavior of how humans interact with these plastics and the impacts on ecosystems to drive towards based solutions. And if you want to learn a bit more about what this looks like, we have a great website. You can visit the website. So this is a classic URI and, or edu. And it has a lot of resources and identifies the kind of most disciplinary experts who are working on this issue. So I mentioned to you before that we have a life-cycle analysis experts looking at this. And these are great people to connect with if you want to discuss topics and maybe the people collaborations or just to bounce some ideas with experts which are outside, you'll kind of like research that area. And so if anyone wants to, wants a virtual introduction, I'll be happy to facilitate that if needed. Otherwise, this is a great resource to go to. So I'm going to start with this slide. I have a quick intro to pass it. Some of you perhaps aren't familiar with the built. And this is a slide I always f not my classes, completion class with asking students what are plastics? Because we're so familiar with that ruins if we just look around our surroundings now we're surrounded by plastics. I'm looking at a camera that's made of plastic. My monitor has plastic, my keyboard has plastic. And I'm sure if you check some of the labeling on your clothing right now, if you're going to check these nucleating on, but you can see that I can your labor you may have like polyester, synthetic textiles like you're wearing in the cockpits. It's in the paint where we're surrounded by this material. It's amazing. It's very robust, it's resilient. It can be molded into anything that we want it to be, to be made into. It's very versatile and very affordable. So that students had struggle about, well, how they define plastics despite the familiarity with this material. So one thing that we discuss is that it is a synthetic or semi-synthetic material. We can build in materials like cellulose, but it still is a semi-synthetic material. But what I think catches students are most is the fact that they are made, largely made from fossil fuels. So we have these oil refinery processes which breaks down crude oil, 2 lighter hydrocarbons to make it easier to commercial use. So an example of this is perhaps a polypropylene which is produced in a plastic, in a plastic print and prefer to, to polypropylene to make it to like plastic bottles for example. But what that's really highlight though, is that plastics are adding to the issue. That is climate change is part of the problem. And so it's something that we have to be mindful of and have to and have to manage carefully if we are to collectively try and alleviate the issues that as climate change. And we mimicked or it's highlighted how versatile plastic says it's everywhere and it's even everywhere where we sampled in the globe. The deepest part Maryanne elaborations in the Marianas Trench. We've sampled plastics above mountains in I'll add even the remotest part of the planet and the polar regions. We are finding plastic, say this stuff is everywhere and it's in our everyday lives. The minute we wake up, we're exposed to and using plastics and argue use of this is not slowing down in any capacity. I'll ask kind of accurate numerical picture that we humble are used in production. Was in 2017, a wheelchair producing just under 350 million tons of this stuff in 2017. And we are projected pre-K, but projection this is to triple this production by 2050. So let's think about COVID for a minute. We are, we're all used to now using walk single use plastics despite efforts pre pandemic to perhaps reduce our plastic footprints. Because we're seeing single use plastic is a tremendous gracious to help reduce the spread of COVID. So I think these projections are going to amplify much to much greater levels than what we originally anticipated pre-coded. So I'll use a plastic is not slowing down in any capacity. And unfortunately, neither does our ability to, to handle the waste that's produced from that plastic. So much of this plastic that we're using and producing a single US, we have a huge amount of waste that we then have to responsibly get rid of. And unfortunately, we're not very good at this. There was a huge amount of mismanagement, waste and a lot of that ends up entire oceans. So at the moment we're estimating as probably an underestimation of about 8 million tons of plastic a year entering our oceans. This is NDK to increases our use of plastic increases. When we look at the kind of oceanic landscape pronoun beaches and things, we can see in general that about 85 percent of those anthropogenic debris that we find in the ocean. Comprise of plastic. So it's a very extensive pollution issue that we have present in our marine environment. And when we consider plastics because define them in terms of their size ranges. So I'm very pretty clustering these together. We have microplastics which are generally anything over five millimeters in size. So this is like meat omega microplastics. So this is like scaling up to anything that's larger than a meter in size. These are things that as humans, we can easily associate and interact with it. So you have all the people you're going to want to clean up a beach. They will access the microplastics and clean and clean them up or to feel like they're contributing to reducing plastic pollution. Things that we do struggle to kind of relate to you and the things that we can't see. So we know this from climate change and this is the same for microplastics where the smaller pieces of plastics which are less than five millimeters in size, we can get down to one micrometer in size. Then we start getting into non-neoplastic territory. And that gets very, that's a tremendously difficult material to work with. Can say small. So why I'm very much focused on this microplastics kinda size range in my research and that's largely what I'm going to be discussing today. And we help you fight plastics and varieties of forms. I mean, you can have these printed like irregular shapes which you can see here that builds until it. But like luxury, beauty products, which I'll talk about in a moment. Happy and it's kinda like spherical node or some of you have probably seen this before. This is typically how plastics are first produced. And these are kind of version palate forms. And that creates high surface area so that these aren't, these classes can be heated efficiently and then molded into any kind of shape and form that they want to, that these passages going to be useful like it, share it with computers, whatever. But also we can get microplastics created from larger plastic pieces as well. So to kind of simulate that, we have this kind of single use, mismanage plastic bottle here. And for UV radiation exposure when it's in the explanation, will half-page oxidation which breaks down the structural integrity of these plastics. And over time with the frictional forces of the ocean, it will break down, fragment into the school and microplastics, which we then call secondary plastics. So we either, there are many pathways in which we can get plastics entering our ocean. So most of it is mismanagement of waste handling unfortunately. So here we've got a few schematics of just some of the well-known couldn't point source introductions of plastics. It's not a fully inclusive less space, just an illustration really about how we know that the N2 are aquatic environment. But here we have like domestic wastewater. So this is things where we have sewage related to brain. So when you have your beauty products, like for example, some of you may use facial scrubs or whitening toothpaste. Like historically, these have to typically contains these kind of spherical micro beads. But the microbiota Free Waters Act 2015 has prohibited the manufacturing, packaging and distribution of these itself. Cosmetics, continue plastic, micro beads. So that certainly improving over time. But it doesn't exclude it from, or products that go into domestic waste proportionally say we're still getting like this, this rinse off, these micro beads are entering our sewage water. And it's the same for washing our clays. Whenever we wash our clothes, many of these textiles are synthetic fibers. The gate they shed hundreds of thousands of fibers per per wash and your washing machine. And these all go down to your Wastewater Treatment Center. And despite the efforts of the wastewater treatment centers to remove these particles in there, they'll allow customers to sing cow. It still allows particles to flow out and remove this debris. It doesn't get rid of all these microplastics and poetry because most white wastewater treatment centers will have a mesh where the water passes through to go through with you the kind of recipient aquatic environment, usually the coastline. And these mesh sizes are usually about 1.5 to six millimeters in size. So this means that it's allowing a pathway for microplastics to enter our coastal environment, unfortunately. And when we think about the presence of wastewater treatment plants, this is typically in areas where we have high urbanization, high-intensity, high densities of human beings are living in a given area. So it can be a high source of microplastics as well because of that. But we also have mismanagement of waste in terms of liters. So we can have like a misspelling people just dropping litter in general when spreading this around. And we have stored water as well which will watch these items to drains all directly to our coastal pathways. I don't know how broadly broadly the city for the US coastline, but I know Rhode Island. We have storm water, which goes down to two storm water drains and go directly to the oceans. So there's no intervention or removal of particles here. So this also creates a pathway of transport these materials to our coastal waters. Unfortunately, we need this because it prevents flooding a given areas, but it is a problem for Pathway and introduction. Then we also have mismanagement of waste from my industry. So textiles may be a good example of this where we have high-intensity textiles being washed consistently. See that shedding more fibers into the environment. And then we have lost marine industry and equipment as well. As well as some might case studies where we see I'm shipping containers being lost like, I think in the coast, off the coast of India recently we saw like millions and billions of needles being launched from a container ship which has washed onto the beaches. Vast and it's huge cleanup efforts carrying on there. So there are many important source introductions of these plastics and 42 are coastal environment. So what does this, I mean, oh, hang on. This faster. This is just an illustration really of your domestic washing machine kind of shedding fibers. So here we have an average so that kind of sticks kilogram washing laid. And if you have polyester or acrylic or textiles within that washing machine, vote for from one single washing machine walks your shedding somewhere between 0.5 million to three-quarters of a million fibers. And that's really just to put it into context, how many we are shedding. There was a lot, unfortunately. So we know that plastics are entering our environment and we know that they'd be distributed. But, and there was international effort to quantify and characterize microplastics in coastal areas so that we can understand what intervention may be needed from a management perspective. And to establish this, we need to establish like strong baseline. So I know that there's a lot of work being done, certainly in the University of Delaware and John and team. We're doing this in Rhode Island. There are many researchers working on just trying to establish these baselines that we have something that we can work from to understand how an extensive problems may, maybe for a particular crystal systems and management organizations. And of course, every coastal environments very unique. They are very, very dynamic. They have different kinds of dynamics, different topographies, different waste management frameworks in place. So it's not like it's a universal, universal, kinda like ML system that fits all. We have to kind of establish this in each value near coastlines. So international researchers, when we collectively look at this, the majority of microplastics that we find in our oceans come from synthetic textiles. Her body speaking about 35 percent of what we have comes from those from the domestic waste and washing machine of these textiles. Something that surprised me when I first entered this kind of research arena was the fact that there's a huge amount or can't hide debris entering our marine environment. And it makes sense when you think about a car tires of 50 percent synthetic rubber. And it's going to be huge frictional friction breaking or small fragments and then spill water, washing that into our coastal environments. And so this is bringing a major input of microplastics into our coastal regions. And then another kind of major majority is city dust. So this is carried by air movement and we have weathering integration of like human-made, like plastic products being moved around and place a lot of fibers as well. I think there was a silence. There was a paper that came out recently that was highlighting how domestic dryers are emitting a lot of fibers into the Internet. Yeah. So we're still learning a lot about what this looks like. And in order to establish these baselines, we kind of have to try and predict where these items are being distributed from these points, horse introductions, so that we can understand whether there are any areas which may be particularly boardwalks. So maybe there's some like sensitive ecosystems we need to protect. Or maybe this particular area, areas of hotspots that we need to look at more closely to how we'd like shellfish management, for example. So to do this, we can look at the physical characteristics of the plastics. So looking at their density for example. So this is your mass per unit volume, grams per centimeter cubed. And see how that, how these plastics sit relative to your, your, your water matrix. So if it's freshwater, that's typically about one gram per centimeter cubed. Or if it's seawater, which is this blue line on the schematic here, that's about 1.02 grams per centimeter cubed. So theories your density of seawater, you will flip. So that seems like polypropylene, polyethylene, and you'll have wide distribution by wind currents. And if you have a heavier density than seawater than you will in theory, think it's okay, like cigarette butts, you will put styrene polyvinyl chloride, PVC, for example. But of course, any of us who work in this, No, it's not as simple as that unfortunately because plastics themselves, if they have like trapped and like a drink or for well, it's going to flip longer. And then once that kind of service brakes and it comes penetrated reporter, it will then think. So. Unfortunately, it starts getting a bit problematic in trying to predict what they've, just, by how they are, whether to behave in a water environment. And of course, biofouling depending on by filing that establishes on these plastics complicates his father because this depends on how productive your coastline is. It also depends on the types of plastic that you're working with because these can be colonized in different capacities by biological material. And this will change the density. So the more biofouling we have, the, the higher the density of these materials go, which affects the rate at which it thinks. And then combined with your your locally unique hydrodynamic characterization of your coastal environment. That will also dictate when they pass how far these passages are distributed from that point source, origin. So things like tides, currents, topography, depth, like whether all these things come into play. I make this narrative much, much harder to make a prediction. So this February emphasizes why we really need to have a comes from baseline so that we can kind of bring all this information together. So if you're looking at plastics and marine environment, having good strong characterization of your coastal environments and really good start because that really helps to arm you with some of those tools that you need to start implementing some of these predictive capabilities. And that's something that we certainly do have here in Rhode Island's might know. John was saying that they haven't Delaware, but the eventual fate of Mexico to end up in the sea bed. So this is a major source site on recipient of plastics, which does concern me because we have animals, many communities and ecosystems which reside on the seabed. So we kind of interested to know how these are kind of like acting together. And many of you will be familiar with the schematic where we look at surface water, car, sorry, trade winds, and along with the thermohaline circulation, we can see surface when driving floating plastics globally across our oceans. And they kind of get traction these gyres, do you say guys or guys in America? Sorry, am I getting, I am getting the axon, yeah. Hey, guys, die as well. We have this, we have these persons get trapped in these areas yet. So many of you have probably seen this in the media. These Great Pacific Garbage Patch people were trying to describe the landmass to emphasize how to use the same laws, and to give you some contact from this, this was estimated to have 80000 tons of plastic, which amounts to about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic. So huge amounts of of plastics in these areas. So despite think there's a lot of cleanup efforts going on here, but we still had my capacity issues here which we can't necessarily clean up because dealing with this will pass six is not simple or easy to clean up what the large materials. But what this does emphasize though, is that we have a global scale and impact of plastics distribution that impact. And so these are, these are pathways for getting plastics to see bad on a global scale. So it is an issue and it does bring some of these risks of, of transport of disease. So studies in the Pacific has shown a huge risks to what contains more than 50 percent of the world's coral reefs habitats as being high risks to February, which is being actually been shown to be colonizing plastic bags, which then become entangled with these coral, coral reef habitats. And what these can do is they increase the risk of disease or syndrome in corals from 40 to 90 percent once they have this entanglement and the breakdown of the skin of these corals. So creating the white, the white syndrome disease. So we have, you can create vectors of transport for disease or equilibrium corporations. There's been some invasive issues as well. So the Japanese tsunami in 2011 has, has created some issues where Hawaii has been the recipient of plastic debris from Japan. And this has come with some invasive with Japanese species which can present a risk to the ecosystems in Hawaii. So there's been programmed to monitor those beaches to reduce those for that UK systems. But these past It's also can act as a vector of pollutants and it's something that we perhaps less, less, less about unfortunately. But when we think about plastics and how they built, some of them are started with the purpose and the original kind of a generation. So let's look at Cambridge. We have a little like I'm screen protected are being built in microbial properties to prevent the spread of COVID, for example. We also have clothing or materials which have anti flammable chemicals built-in as well, flame retardant chemicals built-in. So this can present a potential risk to animals who were maybe exposed to interact with these plastics in the marine environment. But we also know that plastics are very good at building up persistent organic pollutants from the surface of them as they pass through the water. The marine environment, PCBs especially say so. And the risk of that, this is that PCPs we know, can be transferred across the food chain and by accumulate. So there are definitely issues that we have to consider, not just the, these risks or potential interaction or entanglement or ingestion as we're seeing that's happening in the brain sector. So we have these other risks, but one thing that we do know. Classic is resilient, it's robust and it's half long run. It takes a long time. In cases of bottles efficiently, it takes hundreds of years for this material to break down to smaller pieces of plastic. So this is not, it's not gonna disappear, just keeps breaking down to smaller pieces of plastic. So it's a long-term polish it pollution issue as well as a global scale issue as well. So we have to think about this because when we think about climate change, this is another issue that a lot about ecosystems are facing challenges. Does the presence of plastics it's up at exacerbate the responses of animals to climate change. We don't know, but these are some of the questions that we are asking my lab. We know how are these are these kind of issues connected and as it can to make it worse moving forward. So let's talk about this in lecture has some great articles out there. If you haven't seen some of the articles and I'm happy to provide like suggested reading list if any, graduate students want less. But what we do know is that most of the marine animals that we sampled in the marine environment so far have shown to have some level of precedence of microplastics and cite them. So this shows that they are interacting with them whether it's directly or indirectly. And more often than not, we are seeing a high presence of fibers within these animals. So here we have an example of a fiber. And this can comprise many species, somewhere between 60 to about 95 percent of what we find in these animals. We're not exactly sure why yet. And maybe because the complex shape of this fiber is, is it gets entangled Stockholm, the digestive tract we're not sure. We get they, they ingested food sources are some, some species will be in having water free, the system occupation, for example. So these complex shapes may dictate whether they become entrapped in and trained. But we do know animals can each as particles two. And we're still learning a lot about what that looks like from space marine animals. But we also find a little fragments as well, but we didn't necessarily find as many beads. I didn't if there's a link there with the ban on, on, on luxury products. But suddenly there's a preference or fibers and fragments, which kind of corresponds to what we're finding in the marine environment in general anyway. So we know that the classics are everywhere. We know that they are commonly found in marine animals. But what we really need to understand now is to what extent, if any, are these plastics impacting those marine animals? And this is before we even begin to think about how this might be impacting human beings as consumers of CP, for example. And we also need to figure out is, is traveling through the feedback will not. And these are some of the questions that we are asking in my lab, which we'll come to in a moment. And one thing that we do know is there is a big mismatch between what we understand from loves lab studies which are trying to simulate and understand. And we'll responses to exposure to plastics in a controlled environment compared to what we actually find in the natural environment. So let us has a 3D ends. It'll have a great article which could, overviews has kind of frustration. Where what early studies have done that have, they've given extraordinarily high concentrations of plastics that we will never see you in the marine environment. And expose these two animals in a lab context to elicit a response. And those responses are typically be negative. So by this, I mean increased mortality, stunted growth, for example. And we need, we do need these studies because it gives us some insights about how we can direct small future research questions where we might need to put some research focused in the marine sector. But what this does challenge is making sound decisions in terms of waste management strategies and ecosystem management strategies. So we need a better alignment in terms of understanding about what environmentally types of plastics and concentrations of classics like and how that animals are responding to that if at all. So that we can feed that into the decision-making process as well. So this is something that we are working on in my lab. And I know that researchers that are taking a stronger alignment to focus on as well. So before I talk about what we're specifically doing, Rhode Island, but I have, we have this great website here which you are welcome to look up Ozzie mapped to org. This is the Asian state initiative marine plastics. So this is a snapshot of everything that my team are doing in terms of microplastics research and how this fits in the bull, the state with our stakeholder community, because we work by industry and decision-making organizations and NGOs. And what we have here in this website is what our objectives are. We talk about what tools we're using, and we've got some open source information for others who might be interested in taking out some of these tools. And also we're putting on our results as well as we go along moving forward. Because we know that organizations like saying Bay, who are NGOs need this data instantly instituted that they can use this to help them will be for changes and to meet, make sustainable choices regarding plastic consumption and states. So our model system that we're looking at on our doorstep isn't our accounts at bay? So this is here we have now sit back here. We have the state line for before between Rhode Island and Massachusetts. And we really interesting model system that we work with here because it's kind of a semi-closed system. What we have here is we have water coming in from our from outside the bay water. And it comes in a counterclockwise motion towards our heavily urbanized area of the states and we have provenance and we're a carrier up here, which is the kind of get a yellow, greenish speckles here. This is all kind of like an intensity that we have in the area. And along with our heavy urbanization area, we have of course, a big cluster water treatment centers as well. So here we have a major point source of origin of microplastics entering the marine environments. And we also have major river sources as well coming into this entry point to so there's a lot of interesting entry points going on. And then we've got water movement. We're seeing a Southern counterclockwise motion back to the bay mouth as well. So we've been working on the assumption here, all the hypothesis that there could be a concentration gradient or plastics densities and types going from the North down to the south of the Bay, which we wanted to look at to help establish a baseline. Because we really need this to kinda figure out how harvesting opinion on whether that protected at, sorry, excuse me, praises any potential risks to any kind of vulnerable to communities that we need to protect as well. So this is what we've been working with, this, with this gradient system. In our research program, we'd be really looking at trying to assess, assess like surface water debris concentrations characteristics on seasonal behaviour. Because we know that you have wet seasons, dry seasons, and misconduct drawing less or more microplastics points was introductions. So to do this, we've been using a combination of much tool surveys and pop filter system surveys. And we'll talk a little bit more about what they didn't like and abatement something I'm not really going to go into. Great. I'm not gonna go into any detail going into, but we're starting to sample the summer freshwater systems to look at the role of the watershed transport system has fitting into our against at bay so that we can get a broader understanding about what transport looks like and an introduction of point-source. See that we can figure out the broad right durable intervention may need to look like for management perspectives. And then the other objective 3 for our research is looking at the President's impacts or movement of plastics in the food web. So we have a combination of like microcosm, musical experiments that we're using, which we'll speak about in a moment. But whether you're sampling, we're pretty distinct people. But we started doing this. People were very intrigued when they saw as something of all this weird and wonderful equipment and clothing, which will show you in a moment what that looks like. So we ended up having to put this sign together as a kind of introduction and educationalists to what we were doing in the field. But also just to kind of politely ask our public audience to maybe just hold off on talking to us until we've done on sampling so they don't accidentally contaminate your samples because we are working with him in, in some of our sampling will look at your operation down to 10 micrometers in size. So that means everyday clothing that people wear is, is, is a contamination disaster for us to say we're trying to maintain some level of control over that. And when we're out in the field, this is what we typically look like. This is not my fashion choice. This is a necessity for control of contamination. So we have these natural textile, bright orange jumpsuit. And we even had the textiles team member create these orange cotton masks as well because we weren't doing this, partly through the pandemic. And what the 3D does is it allows us to reduce contamination from my everyday clothing. So it means we have a natural fiber, which means it can be removed from our workflow. Process will be kinda digest out organic materials. And I'll talk about that in a moment. But also our interests with very rare color that we find in the marine environment. So we pick this. I'm proud to say that we have better assurance that if we do see bright orange fibers enough samples, It's very lucky that's come from our team. So this is typically how we look in our lab, are now in our sampling efforts in the field. So for month tool serving, what we typically do is we will we will, we, we have a magical that which has 330 micrometre mesh size when we have S. And it's on a kind of stainless steel frame with wings, which kind of floats surface. And here's the plankton that back here. And we can pull this along with our URI research vessel. We tend to do like ten minute incremental and surveys here across the bay. And we have a flow meter inside this so that we can measure how much water we are actually filtering out. We then washed out on our neck, back on the boat with a high powered pump, which has a one micrometer filter in it so that we can have clean water to wash down on that and collect our samples into our glass jars here. But we also have to have strong control measures to account for contamination. So we all have jobs at collapse, just Apple plastics that are open while we're doing this whole process. But we'll also washed down the neck between uses and use that rinse off as another measure of control you to account for any contamination we make up between sampling events. Despite our best efforts to clean than that. And then the lab, there's kind of a process to basically reduce the volume of water and start removing everything else like that. It's probably not plastics to help our chances of success of extracting those plastics from everything else because they all look the same to an untrained eye. So we have samples which are kinda like saved to reduce the volume of the water through 330 my computer and staying still saves. We do as density separation with a hyper stapling solution as well so that we can float out this passage from these non classic heavier materials. And then these plastics, because our lower size and is about 330 micro meters. This is considered quite large for a micro plastic. And it means that we can actually see that quite easily under the microscope, the bar I actually hadn't select these particles from our, from our samples using well-established characteristics described in literature, such as like shape, texture, and color. And then we put them onto this five-by-five kind of glass grid with this double sided sticky tape so that we can keep them in place. And it uses credits of goods or archiving system so that we can locate our samples when needed for our libraries. And we might not be heavily invested into a fully automated Olympus microscope where we can basically put our slang underneath no, automatically do that as the, I think we say seals, as I say he said stacking of images so that we can get high-quality images so that we can do image analysis like potassium, size and describing the characteristics of these plastics. And they also makes it that competitors really important because I'm sure drunken night and Hayden can confirm that these techniques are very labor intensive. Say the more, the more you can automate these methods, the better your life is going to be. Animal sample processing capacity you're going to have in your lab as well. But we're not done yet. We still have more steps to go. We then it's all about basically blowing everything out. That's not, that's not a plastics that, that whenever we have left in our sampling process is a plastic. So another process that we do is a hot needle tasks. And this is kind of semi destructive and which is why we have a good image archiving process going on to get the plastics and the original shape born. But we'll, we'll have a hot needle which you can see just here. We just under the microscope and will it to about 320 degrees Celsius, which is at the point threshold where most plastics will melt. So if it melts that we, we know it's a plastic and then we'll move it to our next line of processing. And if it's not, then we can remove that sample from all from our efforts. And then the final point really is to identify the polymers because it's one thing to describe classics and what they look like in a marine environment. But we need to make a connection in terms of what those materials are and what these potentially linked to in terms of like mismanaged plastic waste. So that we can actually have something up amongst our decision-making organisations to work with so that they know where the intervention is likely needed. So this is a really crucial point about here, is to use Raman spectroscope. So this is a one of the common tools that you use to identify polymers. We can also use FTIR, which we also half, but we prefer this machine. And what this basically does is you put your sample under the microscope and then using software on this, you can track where there's particles are. You point a laser at the item and then it will send the light source to that particle. It will give off a molecular vibration reading. And that's compared to a kind of a database. So you get this like spectra reading here, which you can see at the top here. Notice is compared to a database that we will have to kind of build up through like libraries of samples to be able to identify what kind of material it is. It's another labor-intensive process, but it really gives you a good power to understand where the classics and potentially coming from in your sampling efforts. And this is a great resource. We have an URI and open to external uses as well. So if you're interested in looking at using that, you can go to their redundant torsion per nano science, nanotechnology. And they have some more information about that. Again, I can, I can make an introduction to the direct with that if anyone's interested. So that's how much actual sampling, which we spent about 11 or so, about 1.5 years now sampling on, and I'll share some of our initial data in a moment. But I also wanted to highlight another really exciting method that we're using. And we're really like getting excited about using this new technique, which we start in the next month. So we have this kind of like pump filter system for sampling. So this is what it looks like. He has this aluminum frame. We're staying still planking. We had these things still cartridge filters which go from 280 micro meters down to 10 my Comey tests, we have good small sampling or microplastics size, a sampling capability here. Because the smaller size fractions are areas that we don't understand very well. So we're making efforts to try and incorporate this end. We have a flow meter and we have these isolation valves. And then we have this host connect to against crowded pump. So this allows us to sample high volumes of water, which is very powerful. So it gives us a good representation of what's happening in our marine environment. But also it's a very mobile unit. We can just write the thing on the back of the truck and drive to wherever it can do on a boat. It's a great tool. We're really excited about starting to use this. Or we've been working very hard to kind of see what's capability and extraction successes. And we've got good capabilities with their state allows us also to capture deeper within the water column away from the surface waters that we can start catching some of these like higher density materials as well. So this is really going to innovate forward how we're collecting our plastics. But because we're working with much smaller size spectrums here of plastics, we have a bit more involved process for isolating them. So we have to go through sonication. They stain is still cartridges. We have to stick to remove the water and then we go through an alkaline digestion to remove a lot of the organic material to stop accidental identification as plastics. Because organic material plastics look very similar, we use a stronger salt solution of potassium formate to 1.4 grams per centimeter cubed to capture those denser plastics, not materials. And we use this kind of funnel system because we can think out the materials that are not plastics and then we'd release its clump and those classes were released and that you've done quickly crazy again to maintain your sample up here. And then we can pass that through a vacuum filtration unit. We developed this kind of grid, slight system because it allows us to have better traceability of where our samples are, foil Image Capture. And if anyone wants to UCs and let us know, we can send them to you if you're interested to try. And these aren't they? They really have turned around the way that we are working on processing. Also stain the samples because a or B, we can use fluorescing light sources, which we have also had built, built into our microscope. Because a lot of plastics will naturally fluoresce under flashing light sources, but not all of them well. So we have to kind of help facilitate that process. And as best we can add a stain like my red, which will help some of these plastics fluoresce that wouldn't normally do. That helps us to increase our capacity to identify the plastics. But this is something that's been really helpful for us, is adding Calico flower Evan's blue stain. So what this does is it actually stings any residual organic material that remains in your sample. Meaning that we can then negate that from our microplastics sampling like identification process. So this has really helped us a lot in our sanity and our, and our time. So I recommend it enough. If you, if it's something you're not using already. And this is really just going to highlight what we get collectively in Ireland because microscope, you get these kind of like these multiple fluorescing capabilities laid into the Think-Pair-Share with a normal life circumstances. This is what we have. And you can see the blue staining is really highlighting some organic materials and we can roll it out immediately. Now we can't use a little test here because this gets very challenging. Because these are far too small to work with or without noodles. And say what we do is we put this under the Romans spectroscope and we do a cake slice sampling scheme here. Because of the way that the particles behave in the vacuum filter, we can't just pick random grids because we don't get any distribution. So the cake slice method to use the work, why is representative of what we can typically find a sample? And it saves a lot of time and effort as well. And we had a lot discussions which helps you rock when we're putting these efforts together and she's gone through all of these processes. And there seems to be general agreement in the receptacle that these are good ways to move forward. And then for those of you who are looking at doing this, extraction efficiency testing is something that's emerging. Is sloppiness becoming a necessity for showing how good your workflow process isn't extracting plastic. So what this entails is that you spike your samples were well-characterized control plastic. So here we've got some spherical beads and some fibers. You count how many you put in and start your workflow, me, but it's in your control and environmental samples. And then you count how many you recover at the other end of the process and express it as a percentage. And it seems that the research arena is really wanting to see more than 95 percent, more than 90 percent extraction of business efficiency to have some stunning ground in terms of like your, like what you're able to capture in the marine environment basically highlights that you're losing a little of what we collect from them, from the marine environment. And it gives us some sense of quality control, insurance network data competence. And for us this has been the most time-consuming part for developing these methods is being trying to get good extraction efficiency success, especially with the size spectrum that we're working down to 10 micrometers in size. We're working with like school microbial, like 50 microwave, 15 micrometre beads to cater for that smallest fraction. And that's been a real challenge for us. So we've got a good point now, but it's taken a lot of time to get that to refine our workflow. So I'll run through this really quickly. I'm conscious of time, but here we've got some preliminary results from a survey. So this is again, just to remind you, our seasonal sampling, all of our against the baby from our north to we have our north to south. Gradient here, so here we have it. Why don't they get north-south gradient? And we have spring, summer, fall, and winter. This isn't complete because we still have to all seasons to sample before. But it's just to kinda give you some insights about what we finding. And what we do see is high variability in space-time and across I'm with insights unfortunately. So we're hoping that we can maybe seasonal patterns as we get more samples coming in. But we could, it could be said that we may be seeing some more classic presence within the northern part of our urbanized, heavy urbanized area of the bay compared to the more southern areas. So this does need more data and more examination. But when we compare the average numbers based on what we have found from these multiple surveys. We have at the moment, a mean value of about three particles per cubic meter doesn't sound very much. Kind of see that as being pretty clean. We were interested to see how that looks like against other US site, say Chesapeake Bay sits a little bit lower, it's 0.16. And then in Monterey Bay, six little bit height 1, 32. So we're sitting in the middle there. But we'll know more as more research comes out from coastal areas that we can make comparisons against someones we call mutations together. But what we are seeing is more fragments in our samples, which we have here compared to perhaps fibers. And we think this is because this is surface waters. So fibers are typically dense and therefore thinking out of the water column, say, it's probably so we've kind of capturing these kind of lighter particles in the surface waters, which perhaps as an example, price. And a lot of those particles are polyethylene, polypropylene, which are allegiance to materials with some, some amount of polystyrene as well. So that's giving us some beautiful thought about where these sources make. Maybe this sounds like it could be someone from very equipment or drinks bottles, for example. So let me looking at that more closely. But something that we were interested to know was what sampling was understanding like at what point in the title cycled probably best example because tight is going to be pushing different volumes of water and therefore different numbers, the plastic particles along with it. So what we decided to do was to look at this in more detail. So we did a short-term high frequency sampling events where we sampled 10 times across a tidal cycle through key sites. Now, so here we have the title height in this line here. And this is the kind of number of particles that we captured along that and thankful. So what this really highlights is when you sample matters, because that will dictate how much you're collecting. So it really does need consideration from your sampling efforts and designs when looking at the natural environment in terms of its plastic loading and particle movement. And another competitor that we've been looking at as well is looking at how animals are responding to environmental development concentrations of plastic. So this is where we kinda like simulate these conditions and then control lab environments. We have like always, I'm extraction air filters to remove particles may have these strong protocols, querying regulation and clean protocols and clean benches, et cetera. And what we did was we worked with the eastern oyster, the cross Austria virginica for a few reasons. One, no one's really investigated this animal before in terms of like microplastics impacts as I filter feeder that kinda concentration of other species of moister. But we'll say this is very commercially important species. It's worth about $6 million a year industry for Rhode Island and say we want to understand whether there are any potential risks of these animals been exposed to the fibers, for example. So we, much of our textiles experts in Rhode Island to be exposed oysters for about 45 days. Shorter experiment just to get some insights on the effects of physiology of these animals. And we looked at a control where we had no microplastics in the tanks of water. We gave them a kind of environmentally relevant concentration. So this is two fibers per liter and then 95 fibers per liter. And these are kind of both ends what we find in the environment in terms of the low concentrations, but also the higher end of concentrations. But we have heavy urbanization going on. And then we had a pretty high concentration of 955 is per liter because it'll mostly to kind of use this is this vigorous their concentration. So we wanted something that was comparative against other literature to see how he sacked in terms of the responses that we found. And my graduate research assistant kind of Haskell, she successfully defended her masters recently, did this work. And she found that these animals were very robots to exposure of these fibers. They showed no, no responses at all despite favorites a fiber exposure in the clearance rates that cellular energy allocation. So we were really excited about ethnic shows that there is some that these animals can be robust onto the settings. But something that had a debt highlight was something that has strong methods, kind of connotations. Is when we were looking at using these fibers, we wanted to understand how they were behaving in our tanks and our water and our tanks to understand what the exposure really was. And what he noticed was that in literature, not many people will go to the effort of describing how particles behaving or the retention time is in the water. This could be problematic because it seems that they could be an assumption that with gentle aeration, that should be enough to keep your materials suspended and therefore having printing a constant exposure of those particles to your animals. But what had he found was this is really not the case, especially with these dense materials like fibers. So she basically introduce these fibers into a tank environment and then sampled hourly or every other hour for 24 hours. And she found within, within the hour mostly settled out. So it really shows that there is not a constant exposure despite aeration in these tanks that we use. And we, we tried everything between steroids. We tried gentle or more vigorous aeration and these things will not spend. So highlight exposure is not necessarily constant. And that we do need to count twice IN experiments so that we have better understanding about what the picture looks like, but also to enable better comparison across literature. So bit of extra work for us to do in our lab studies on, we're looking at this. And then we have these trophic transfer experiments that we're going to be question on this summer. We have these wonderful outdoor me that caused them. So these have, we have tunneled them. We can temperature, we can manipulate the temperature and it brings in Rossi water, but we can also filter that as needed from Americans at bay area. This is the Bay campus environment and our account sets. And they have a capacity of water greater than a cubic meters of water. So we have like large-scale trials that we can do on goods or trophic transfer or ecological studies that these are typically useful. So what we're going to be doing now is looking at how fibers behave across the free bread when introduced to oysters and then given to credit predatory crabs such as the blue crap. So we are excited about looking at this in more detail. We're a little bit terrified of working with these big crabs because they're pretty aggressive. But it'll be interesting to see what this looks like because there are terrific trophic transfer experiments which have occurred, but again, using very high concentrations of plastic. So he just wants to see whether environmental elements looks like to see if there's anything that we need to be concerned about. Last slides. Another kind of component we've been looking at is animals are actually reside and interact with the tea bags who might be working with sea urchins since 2005 there. I've been nicknamed this young lady in terms of like the different maps I've worked out. But I love what can these atoms and the commercial inequality, It's really important as well. Sea urchins will graze constantly on the seabed. They have this kind of like this, this Langton, this absolute Stanton set teeth. So they have these teeth which kind of ape and wide and then graze on the teabag, scraping the bed and putting in the free license to the digestive tract. Constantly say it's going to have a direct interaction with sea bed, which remember is that final fate of most plastics that we have in the natural environment. And I was interested to know whether feeding habit might have any connotations in terms of sensitivity to exposure to plastics. So when I was in Europe, also essay should say UK, we do belonged to your painting. You're at home. Fortunately anymore, browser UK we worked with to European species of sea urchins. We have power centroid, it's limitless. This has mostly kind of herbivorous types. It's used to ingesting soft algae. Dietary intake a little bit by some animal matter to these are generally omnivorous animals, but this particular species is used to ingesting the soft algae components in the diet. And in comparison, some economists, meteorites, which is called the greens reaction, is a very broad on an omnivore, so it's used to intaking not just the soft diet, three algae components, but it also will graze on animals with hard skeletons and hard shells as part of its regular dietary intake. So it's got an experience of processing, has components for its digestive tract which Pax6 can present as an issue through physical abrasion when passing through digestive tracts of animals. And I made it kind of artificial diet, which was wealth doesn't and cleaned. I added to my conclusion PBC particles ranging from 50 to 60 micro meters in size. Cities are concentrations and types that we will find in the natural environment and respect these animals for three months to see what would happen to that kind of physiological status. So they surprise the strong omnivore which is used to taking in regular hot components, was very good at coping with, with the ingestion and processing of plastics. It didn't seem to be affected entity that we measured. But our animal that had a strong herbivorous soft dietary intake did show some nutritional restrictions, which I chose something like sensitivity to the ingestion of microprocessor. Said this manifested itself through the alimentary and texts which is the kind of gut, gut wall, which can be a nutrition or secondary nutritional site for these animals. So the gut became compromised, nutritionally speaking, so shaped that these animals were more sensitive to the intake of plastic. So it got me thinking that this might be interesting to examine whether we can use feeding habits as a kind of way to identify sensitivity to my classic ingestion of benthic invertebrates. So it's something that we're looking at in more detail now. But overall, what this really shows there is that When we think about decision-making organizations and policy change, we still, we still need to implement these all work is showing the animals are shown to be quite robust to exposure of some types of plastics in terms of what we focus on our lab. But it doesn't necessarily mean that we should not take action. These are still anthropogenic pollution items that need to be tackled. And they present risks to many communities. In some animals are responding in a negative way, even under environmental conditions that we are, we are finding in water. But it, but boy is, what is reassuring from my perspective is that we are seeing some tolerance of these animals is perhaps not the initial doom and gloom kind of story that I love that To leads us to believe. So I kind of want to say, thank you for your, for your, for your time and for listening to this talk. I need this kind of been a quick overview of what we're doing, but I think it's kinda nice just to kinda talk about some of these methods that we're using as potential ways to collaborate or at least help each other as Research Institute to find out how we can tackle this pollution issue collectively for the greater good of sustainability. But this is our team who works on this issue. We have a broad multidisciplinary team. We have Andy Davis is an ecologist. We got graduates, Research Assistance, Sarah Davis and Haskell. We've got mass and bind to the textiles expert and multicolor machinery. He's not waste production and pathogens expert. I'll be happy to do any virtual introductions. You don't even want to talk to any of this community. But otherwise I'm going to stop there. I'm sorry, taking a little bit longer than I anticipated, but I will say thank you very much for listening. Thank you so much. Colony that was scraped. So we have a little bit of time for questions and choline so she could stay a little bit longer if need be so questions that anyone has its re-prioritize students. So you could put your hand up a colony. Rich. Go for it. I great presentation. Thank you. Dr. second, you see like a plastic concentrations in wild oysters in their system? I didn't catch the first part. Can you repeat that, please? You see micro plastic concentrations in the wild oysters. Then you will probably see if you want to. Do you see that north to south gradient in concentration across the the wound oyster beds? Yeah, that's a great question and it's one that we want to ask and we haven't got around to sampling them yet, or precisely two samples. We have two samples in our freezer right now. We do see prevalence of fibers in the oysters. And it fits within what we find in the research landscape. Within its just a handful of fibers per animal. They're very good at processing these particles. I mean, I know water's got some tremendous video footage and some of his literature which shows the mantle area kinda like processing and sorting through the plastics and pre-select removing them without ingesting them. But what we are, what we learned from how does work is that the more plastics that I didn't say this, the speaker, but the more plastics you expose the animal to you and in any kind of setting, from the more that you will get fined ingested in these animals. So despite their ability to be able to select these particles, they still ingests more as they're exposed to more. I think the next question really is we look at declaration processes. So this is something I'm used to in the UK compared to the US where if you subject to an oyster or any shellfish to a clean water environment, they can actually remove most of these particles through this declaration process. Very well. So there's doubt whether we can really use oysters as a kind of biomonitoring tool, but they can give us a bit of a snapshot about what things look like when they're actually interacting. The marine environment. I think we're still establishing, but yeah, we didn't know about the gradient that we expect to find, a gradient of concentration that will result from our website. Thank you. Thank you for that. Yeah, I have I'm very curious about is there any program to monitor the sea surface and micro plastic from the space? Because I think it is very, very small. And if dy is a problem, that must be very challenging project, that is a great question. I don't know beyond why. Because people can monitor like plants, communities that they use in satellite images. I imagine you could probably use that for I mean, I I'm guessing here. I don't I honestly don't know. Maybe someone else in the community. Maybe John has an idea, but you could probably use that as a way to track large, larger planets? Probably not. Yeah, because we're looking at like trying to do in C In Situ measurements or to capture much a microplastics in surface waters because we've got a great Xcode project running an amendment which is kind of monitoring a whole bunch of stuff using fluorescent light sources for plants and communities. And we wanted to see if we could translate that to plastics, but I don't think I didn't think it would translate very well because for the most part, like type, some plastic particles don't fluoresce and you need to use it consistently, but we have to we have to prioritize it for our communities, for the projects that are running there at the moment. But there can be tools that can be developed to do that, but at the moment we haven't fragmenting of active. Okay, So another question is, do you know the size, the spatial size of the so-called Great Pacific patch? A spacious yeah, no. No. It's awesome. I obviously, I will find out for you and I would like to thank Kim. Thank you, Faith. Get hauled. Questions. On the satellite side, feel free to catch up with Alan Mason and to be as coca and myself, we're working on that. Sentinels to satellite data to try to understand the microplastics are too small as you say, but the macro debris are possible and then also delineating areas almost like your second question, where we know concentrations of microplastics are going to be higher and delineating those areas and use that as a proxy for, for areas of high microplastics concentration. Nice. This is why I like joining, like having two sessions like this because you've eaten. Learn more about the cool tools that people are using, adopting to try and help with these, address some of these issues. Say, Yeah, it's really cool connection to you about that. Carolyn. Hi. Thank you for your talk was really interesting to watch. And I had a question. One of your figures have shown your results for both the season or in the spatial scale gradients for your sampling. And I thought the seasonal patterns or possibility of patterns were really interesting and who isn't. It was difficult to tell from the figure whether anything was like specifically significant, but it seemed like, for example, like your summer Fall trends were consistently lower. And I was wondering if you had any thoughts on like what environmental drivers you mentioned tides or whether they were like human drivers that you could speculate that might be related to like seasonal patterns of micro plastic distributions. Doing that? Yeah. Thanks. I think that thanks for that comment and question two. Yeah. What are the driving forces behind looking at seasonality was to kind of link in some of these like wet seasons pass and dry seasons. Because with the wet seasons we're seeing increase storm drain intervention or introduction of plastics or sorry, we're seeing more rain water coming into the system and with that brings more potential plastic introduction into the bay. So what we really wanted to do was like see how storm drains, maybe whether wet seasons are showing higher amounts of plastics. And also with with that you have increased volumes of water moving around as well. So who wants to see whether there was a bigger shift or like plastics happening around the Bay Area. So the emphasis here really was a starting point to kind of recap. What is the different seasons show us that we can understand better. More introduction looks like across a temporal process because some studies are looking at classic presence within a particular time point the year, which doesn't catch all that variation more than anything. So what action that means? I don't know. I mean, can we intervene with like storm water drains? Maybe not. There are some feasibility issues that it's the same weight wastewater treatment centers as well. They may be evil lady was like more orthonormal as well during these times, Last time to being with these processes. And we know that narrow gap neuropathy. Now I can say pay commission, which runs along the way wastewater treatment sentence here. We do work with them while there's no mandate for them to do anything. I didn't think that's getting more traction that they can take, but there are some teams in our group you are working on trying to come up with technologies to remove plastics, are using some of their physical characteristics. So I, I'm, I'm, I'm unable to, to talk about that. That's for them to discuss those kinda like technologies that they're, that they're looking at. But there's definitely some problems you benches that were they can help come up with some technologies that would help reduce plastic coming from wastewater treatment centers at least. But yeah, it's it's more about just trying to capture seasonally what this looks like so that we can start asking more refined questions and, and directing funding towards more kind of specific goals in terms of what we want to find out from a management perspective. Thank you. Rick, questions. Actually had a question. So I thought that the the counterclockwise circulation in the bay was was a pretty interesting feature. And an osha sampling transects on kind of the West side of that circulation. I was curious if you had any plans for doing sampling on the east side. Just to kind of compare water coming into the bay versus water passing the urbanized areas and then coming back out. Yeah. That's a great question, Hayden. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons we pick that trend texts because there's only so much you could possibly do within a a crowdfunding project as many of you will have experienced. But yeah, we are starting to look at that now. There's also, we're bringing in hydrogen article modelling into, into the context itself. But I don't understand why we think Pascals maybe collating and we can retrieve testing that. So there are some areas that we've identified as hotspots, which I'll rhythm mouth area. So we'll kind of extending the effort now so that we can better characterize that. Because I agree that we need to find out what that what that looks like. But for us it was more a question of what kind of, what kind of distribution and point-source introduction we seeing from this like urbanize gradient down to the South to better understand what that learning looks like. But yeah, there's a broader brought a broader capacity happening now along with the freshwater kind of watershed areas that we can put an understanding about the baseline. That gotcha. Uh, I did have one other quick question. You mentioned you preferred Raman over at our house. Kinda just curious why you prefer that? Good question. I think it's just because we're more familiar with that tool and we can actually work with smaller particle sizes with the Raman them become the FTIR that works with, say, with the Obama. We can get onto my commitment size with the FTIR equipment that we have. A car with a specific model. I can share that information with you. A map with a follow-up e-mail. That size tends to go down to about 50 or a 100 micro meters. So we just used around because we're also creating a library with the Raman as well. So we've got everything and it could be like a database together as well with one tool. Gotcha. Thank you. Questions? Okay. Well, thank you so much, Colleen. It was great to great to have you and really appreciate all the information. And K there has been a pleasure. I'm thankful for everyone to this wonderful opportunity to speak with you all. And if anyone has any further questions or wants to reach out, I'm happy I can share my email out through. If you're happy with that, you reach out. And also if you want any directions or resources based on I think that we've supplied today, just let me know and I just apply that to you. But otherwise, thanks very much. Have a great day. And I actually have a question, but I don't want everybody on for it. So the pump system that you have, is that so did you did you make it Did you design it? Is, if anything, published about the schematics of it? Yeah. Say we actually based this from a design. We actually based it and adapted it from a design by lens, a towel. So I can share that people with you after this with the follow-up e-mail. But we have a description of all of this, I think on our website as well. It's like you're directly to that link as well, that it's been a tremendous tool. It's been really fun to use. The biggest challenge really is because it's working on, so we'll assign spectrum of plastics is really, we had to put a lot of effort into show how efficient it is and how clean we can get it between sampling events as well. But we've kind of got some protocols in place for that, which I'm happy to share with you as well. If that's something that you're interested in looking at and I will say, you know, you're welcome to visit and see the thing if you want to check it out. So what sort of filters? So it's the other just there. I'll steal filters. Yeah. The 10-inch cautious filters, stainless steel. And if that's something you're interested in that can I lost my, my, my colleague tends to all of them. So I can, I can get the link for where we get these from. Another expense everyday. And they're very versatile but we find stop sonication them is definitely necessary to kinda like get as plastics dislodged trauma because they can get trapped into a high pressure at the pump. That's interesting. Yeah, we've, we've done a lot of sort of just isolated pump sampling. And I've always struggled with how to deal with the high volume of water flow on the back-end. And then we also do a lot of water grabs and we find that there's a huge difference in the concentrations we get with the water grabs versus the nets. And so we're trying to justify that. And so I think other pumps sampling approaches are are ways to think about that or are appreciated? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we'll have to show anything that you need to access, so i'll I'll I'll get some information back and forth. That's your appreciate it.
SMSP Spring 2022 Colloquia Speaker Series - Dr. Coleen Suckling
From Yun Li May 06, 2022
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Zoom Recording ID: 95225027531
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Meeting Time: 2022-05-06 03:12:11pm
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