Microplastics—the tiny plastic particles that break down from plastic products—are everywhere. And they are on a lot of people’s minds, which is why people ask me about them.
We hope to refine our techniques to the point that we can collect a sample from a river or other area in nature to study how microplastics are affected by the natural environment. I hope to establish this method as viable enough that we could collect some of those challenging, real-world samples and be able to study them the same way, using the microplastic analysis techniques that I use on pristine samples.
Although microplastics are a huge problem, there’s also a dedicated group of scientists and researchers who want to help solve it. Being a part of this community that’s doing such amazing work trying to push this research forward and find solutions really keeps me motivated.
Taking microplastics research from the lab to the lake
To study these particles, I use a tool that can help researchers measure and understand elements in plastics and other items. This tool is known as single particle inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (spICP-MS). Current techniques don’t measure the tiniest particles and don’t work with all types of microplastics. The long-term goal of my research is to expand the measurement technologies to a wide variety of particles and those of smaller sizes.
My love of discovery and learning has also translated into an immense interest in how things work in the environment and the world. So, I figured science would be an ideal career.
Because I’m a microplastics researcher, my friends sometimes jokingly ask me, “How many microplastics do you think I consumed this week?”
Right now, we’re still mostly working with pristine plastic samples. We take samples from household products and grind them up into a fine powder. We then put them into a liquid solution that preserves the particles for analysis. But out in the world, plastic gets wet, dirty, or damaged. We need to be able to measure plastic as it actually exists in the environment.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved building, tinkering, and figuring out how things work. I loved to build Lego models and would, at times, disregard the instructions to make my own creations. I routinely took things apart, particularly electronics, to figure out how they were configured or how they worked. Once I was satisfied, I would put them back together (although I wasn’t always successful). To this day, I enjoy building desktop computers and will always try a repair job on my own purely for my own curiosity.
If we want to address microplastics, we must understand them and be able to measure them properly. That’s what I’m doing as a Ph.D. student researcher at NIST and the University of Maryland.
One of the things I love most about my job is being able to modify instruments and adapt them to study microplastics—since I am a tinkerer.
Many effects of microplastics remain unknown
Currently, I’m working on tools to analyze carbon in tiny plastics. Plastic polymers are primarily made up of carbon-based compounds. So, to measure microplastics, we need to better understand one of their main “ingredients”—carbon.
Although carbon is a major element of plastic, it’s not the only element. Other compounds in the form of additives are added to plastic to give it desirable properties. As these plastics break down, these additives stay with the microplastic particles. We can then try to use these additives to make measurements of microplastics for a different way to assess environmental and health effects, in addition to other key properties of these particles.
This research is still in its earliest stages, but we have some goals to learn even more about microplastics in the future.
I’m working to develop instruments that can help measure tiny microplastics. How small? While microplastics vary in size, the range of particles I work with is between 1 micrometer (a millionth of a meter) and 5 micrometers. To give you an idea of how small that is, a human hair’s width is typically 17-180 micrometers.