Perseverance in the Pursuit of Plastics

Three months ago I conducted my first interview with the 2019 UPP Seed Grantees, and today I conducted the last. Each conversation showed me how a human characteristic can be a great tool of research: the ability for people to collaborate in pursuit of shared goals binds people together in the mutual investment of time, energy, and emotions. Elise Granek (PSU) and Elena Nilsen’s (USGS) project is a story of collective perseverance, it shows how we all depend on one another and our built environment to pursue goals for the benefit of people everywhere.

Elise and Elena are interested in understanding the contamination of water and how this impacts ecosystems and organisms. The specific objective of their Seed Grant project is to establish whether there is quantifiable co-occurence of pharmaceutical and personal care product contamination with microplastics in wastewater effluent. It is significantly more expensive to analyze for pharmaceutical waste than it is to analyze for microplastics. So, if Elise and Elena can establish the co-occurrence of these pollutants then environmental managers and scientists may be able to sample for microplastics as a proxy. The money saved could allow for testing in more geographic regions which would expand policy support for more, usually disadvantaged, communities.

Elena reported that this project was made possible by the UPP, “it is nice to feel like the institutions are supporting that collaboration,” rather than reinforcing siloes. Elise described how this collaborative environment has allowed her to lean on the expertise of Elena and the USGS scientists, who bring different skills and awareness, which, Elise says, is especially helpful with designing research questions and methods. Lingering barriers to collaboration continue in the institutions’ differing rules and policies regarding equipment, finances, data, etc., but, from my conversation with Elise and Elena, it feels as though many of these barriers will continue to shrink as UPP affiliates become more skillful in the navigation of these policies.

Other social and technical barriers remain. When the nationwide shutdowns for COVID-19 began, Elise, Elena, and their student researchers lost access to PSU’s labs and the equipment needed to run the experiment. It would be about a year and a half before the samples had been processed and ready to be sent off for confirmatory testing at OSU. While waiting in the testing queue, a critical piece of equipment at the OSU lab would malfunction and be out of service for months. After nearly two years, Elise and Elena had finally received their final data on the morning of this interview.

To endure two years of delays and malfunctions is one thing, but the team’s reliance on student assistance at the PSU labs was another can of plastic worms. A lot of PSU students, along with people everywhere, have struggled socially, economically, and psychologically since the pandemic started, and this led to unanticipated turnover within Elise’s lab. It is testament to the resilience and perseverance of the student population that enough students have remained committed and engaged to retain continuity and institutional knowledge critical to the lab’s operations. The students’ resilience, paired with the perseverance and patience of Elise and Elena, is fundamental to the success of this project.

Congratulations on completing your data collection, Elise and Elena, and we here at the UPP are rooting for a smooth analysis and reporting phase of work.