Proliferating plastic pollution sparks change in approach

ST. LOUIS — As plastic pollution soars — filling waterways, air, soil and living things with the material — some in St. Louis are joining efforts to confront the crisis through new approaches.

Experts hope the shifting strategies — which include harnessing crowd-sourced data to learn more about what kind of waste accumulates and where — could result in better policy interventions and ultimately help spark widespread re-evaluation of who shoulders the burden of plastic waste. That means potentially pushing greater responsibility toward producers, instead of leaning on consumers to constantly clean up the mess as disposable, single-use plastic proliferates.

“We’re trying to figure out what’s ending up on the ground, so that we can prevent it,” said Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia engineering professor who researches plastic waste issues.

Lately, Jambeck has focused on the Mississippi River basin. She is involved with an initiative that recently enlisted St. Louis-area volunteers to record the types of litter they picked up during a cleanup event and the precise location of where they found it.

The results were fed into an online “Debris Tracker” database that Jambeck helps run alongside partners like the National Geographic Society. The work helps establish a baseline map of the litter.

Researchers ran pilot cleanup events this spring in St. Louis; St. Paul, Minn.; and Baton Rouge, La., and aim to expand to other cities along the Mississippi in the future.

As a data collection bonus, researchers put tracking devices in a handful of plastic bottles and released them into the river at North Riverfront Park to shed light on how plastic waste moves along the corridor. The bottles tended to get stuck along the banks, among docked barges. But after a slow start, one of them covered more than 1,400 kilometres over 11 days, before being scooped up by a Louisiana fisherman near Baton Rouge. He contacted the researchers, as requested on a message with the bottle.

“I was just in disbelief,” said Jambeck. “Our hypothesis is it basically hitchhiked on a barge.”

Plastic debris — often broken into small pieces called microplastics — increasingly saturates inland waterways and oceans, with plastic bags even finding their way to the bottom of remote, deep-sea trenches.

Plastic pollution not only affects the environment, but also clogs wastewater infrastructure, poses risks to public health, and makes river-based recreation and tourism a tougher sell, said Colin Wellenkamp, executive director of executive director of the Mississippi River Cities and Towns Initiative.