Author: Karen Cullinane

Around 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, October 2, 2021, the United States Coast Guard was notified that Amplify Energy’s 17-mile San Pedro Pipeline, off California’s Huntington Beach coastline, was leaking. By Sunday morning, birds and fish were washing up onshore, covered in oil, and the beaches were closed to a concerned public. Days later, there are still more questions than answers about what is already shaping up to be one of California’s largest oil spills in the state’s history, having already resulted in at least …

The presence of microplastics—fragments of plastic smaller than 5 millimeters—is ever increasing across all types of environments, from cities to waterways. Moreover, microplastics do not biodegrade easily; the process can take hundreds of years. The ubiquity of durable microplastics in our environment, and the challenges we face in removing them due to their small size, has resulted in a significant amount of research intended to assess the ways by which microplastics can be eliminated.

A recent study in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces is the …

Microplastics, which are fragments of plastic smaller than 5 millimeters, have increasingly been released into the environment over the last several decades—primarily into bodies of water—whether during production, use, or degradation of plastic products. Microplastics have been found in over one hundred aquatic species, in sources of food such as crops, and within large plastic debris piles floating across the ocean. The prevalence of microplastics pollution across ecosystems, exacerbated by the fact that microplastics are not easy to biodegrade, has prompted proposals and passage of …