The Chesapeake Bay Plastic Survey is intended to assess the necessity and to generate a baseline for a future monitoring effort for plastics pollution trends in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Awarded the Woodward and Curran’s Impact Grant, Ocean Research Project will assess bay-wide plastic pollution by exploring plastic particle count as a water quality indicator for monitoring future bay health. In cooperation with its partners, ORP hopes to repeat this project biannually to enrich understanding of the Bay-wide magnitude of plastic pollution, export to the ocean, and how that is changing relative to Bay improvements and climate change.

ORP’s study will be the first to determine particle concentration of plastic pollution across the United States’ largest estuary, the Chesapeake Bay. The information from this pilot project will be used to inform a dedicated multi-year sampling program by the Chesapeake Bay Program partners at the federal, state, and local levels.

The abundance of plastic garbage created by modern human civilization has infiltrated the deepest trenches of the world’s oceans and concentrated in huge areas on its surface. An estimated 5.5 trillion pieces of plastic debris are in the world’s oceans. There are countless sources of this plastic debris, but virtually all of it originates on land through the overuse of plastics in our daily lives and improper waste disposal. Once plastic trash enters the Ocean, nature’s forces and the migration of marine species and birds determine how the plastic material and chemical compounds move and accumulate through the complex marine environment, including the food chain and the Plastisphere. Much of this plastic debris is concentrated at the centers of enormous oceanic current circulation regions, called gyres.

We know a little more about chemical transfer risk in the sea food chain. Check out our collaborative publication in Marine Pollution Bulletin to find out more…Here

The world’s plastic ends up settling in the Arctic Ocean. Our paper shares how to minimize the pollution at the top of the world, Ocean currents, wind, and animals largely transport these materials from an origin that is well South of the polar region. It’s a global shared problem, and the fix starts with replacing a harmful product material with an earth-friendly bio-material...Here

To better understand the nature of plastic debris in the Ocean, ORP has conducted multiple research expeditions in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic Oceans. ORP completed its first marine debris research expedition in 2013. During this trip, its crew spent 70 days sailing in the Atlantic Ocean, collecting samples of plastic trash in the water and mapping out the eastern side of the North Atlantic garbage patch. The following year, ORP embarked upon a second expedition to research microplastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean. During this trip, ORP’s crew sailed 6,800 miles nonstop from San Francisco to Yokohama, Japan, collecting microplastic samples along the trans-pacific route.

Due to the flexibility offered by doing research from a sailboat, ORP’s expeditions could dedicate more time to collecting data samples across a much broader area than other similar types of marine research expeditions would typically cover. ORP’s research has provided an essential baseline for marine surface debris data and improved knowledge of the concentration, composition, and extent of plastic debris in the Ocean. ORP conducted its research to ensure the samples could be used to support further research being done as part of plastic pellet toxicity studies at the University of Tokyo’s Pelletwatch program. In addition, ORP’s research was designed to allow ORP and participating scientists to define further the diversity of the Plastisphere, specifically the roles played by bacteria and viruses in their evolving relationships with plastic debris in the Ocean.

ORP’s research expeditions targeting the investigation of northern hemisphere subtropical gyres of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean and well as the western Arctic’s plastic pollution in the marine environment have helped increase the scientific community’s understanding of plastic’s pollution’s pervasive distribution across oceans from the sea ice to the seabed. The extensive datasets and that ORP collected, processed and regional interpretation during these expeditions contributed to the following publications:

To date, ORP has sailed tens of thousands of miles, spent many months at sea, and a considerable amount of time in labs back on land sorting the samples and data. During our extended periods of time at sea, there was not one day that went by where we did not see foraging birds mistaking marine debris for food. The fight to prevent pollution from plastic debris in the ocean is best fought at the primary source, on land. Education is a critical element of this effort to increase public awareness and encourage proper disposal of plastic trash along with reduced use of plastics (link to ORP’s education page).