Less than 10 percent of all plastics get recycled, and much of the rest ends up in rivers and oceans, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A group of Virginia Tech students spent the summer analyzing how much and what kinds of microplastics are in the Chesapeake Bay.
Students traveled to two marshes to collect sediment layer samples, which they brought back to a lab in Blacksburg. In the marsh, they saw plastic chairs, a tire, and lots of small pieces of plastic, said senior Allison Montgomery.
“Going to a salt marsh for the first time was really eye opening,” Montgomery said. “Just to see, like, the amount of stuff that gets washed on and collected. And then to see it in a lab.”
From there, they isolated fiber thin microplastics from the sediment, and studied them with a heavy duty microscope and a spectrometer. Student Ted Docev explained they used these machines to trace what kinds of microplastics are in the soil. He said their results didn’t have too many surprises- lots of microplastics showed up. Samples from soil layers dating to the 1950s showed pollutants like polystyrene. Layers from recent years had a lot of different, newer types of microplastics. Though there were some samples from layers that date before 1950 that had microplastics that hadn’t even been invented yet.
“So somehow they’re like migrating downwards in the soil, but we don’t know how yet,” Docev said.
Their professor, Tina Dura said more research is needed to explore this further, but it could mean that storms cause sediment to mix and churn, pushing microplastics further down into the sediment.
“Also, our sediment dating profiles will be improved in the future, and we will be more confident in the age-depth relationship downcore,” Dura said.
Five students spent four weeks working on the project, which was funded by the Virginia Tech Seale Coastal Zone Observatory.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
