The Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy is hosting a Great Lakes Microplastics Summit this week to share its latest findings. The summit takes place during Microplastics Awareness Week, newly designated by Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
EGLE’s research on on plastic pollution and microplastics throughout the Great Lakes is funded by a $2 million grant. Jeff Johnston, a spokesperson with EGLE, said that money extends through 2029.
“It enabled us to hire two additional staff people to work on this,” he said.
EGLE is also working on a five-year surface-water sampling plan to get benchmark data researchers can use to measure future progress.
Eddie Kostelnik, an environmental quality analyst at EGLE, said they found that the microplastic presence in the Great Lakes is changing, and not for the better. “We have slowly gotten more and more research showing that microplastics are everywhere, across all the Great Lakes that are sampled,” he said. “We use the word 'ubiquitous.'"
Kostelnik said sources of microplastics include synthetic clothing, vehicle tires, fishing nets, and "nurdles," or small plastic pellets, used in industrial processes.
Johnston said microplastics and their effects need to be better understood in order to grasp how they are affecting the health of Michiganders. Recent studies have found the potential for "adverse health effects," but research remains limited.
Population densities and industry manufacturing are hotspots that academics have been researching, Kostelnik added. He said urban centers with higher amounts of litter are seeing more microplastics.
Johnston said it's important to raise public awareness on microplastics because they appear not only in our water, but on land and in the air as well. Kostelnik added that EGLE's research has found Michiganders are inhaling and ingesting microplastics regularly.
“A lot of environmental hotspots or challenges kind of creep up on us,” Johnston said. “And I think we’re at a point now where people have come to understand fairly recently just how extensive the problem of plastics in our environment is.”
Kostelnik said EGLE's work has discovered that microplastics bio-accumulate in the Great Lakes through the food chain as animals ingest them. That means they become more concentrated in animals higher up the food chain, because when those animals consume their prey, they also ingest the microplastics that those prey animals had eaten.
According to Johnston, 10,000 metric tons of plastic enter the Great Lakes every year.
EGLE’s goal is to understand the scope of the microplastics problem. “It comes down to being aware of just how much plastic we interact with in our daily lives,” Johnston said. “When you understand the damage these products can do in the long term to our environment, that should be a motivator to a lot of people to be mindful when to choose plastics and when to look for alternatives.”
“Unless we start to find ways to reduce that amount and remove some material, we’re heading for bigger problems down the road,” Johnston concluded.
