URI_Research _Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2020_Melissa-McCarthy

Last fall, The Ocean Agency founder and CEO Richard Vevers queued up a slide in his keynote presentation that showed a credit card dipped into a coffee cup. “Whether you know it or not,” Vevers said, “you are consuming a credit card’s worth of plastic every week.” The crowd of about 60 gathered at the University of Rhode Island’s (URI) W. Alton Jones campus in West Greenwich, RI, audibly gasped in unison. The group comprised representatives from academia, government, industry, and non-profits, drawn together by the University’s newly launched effort to address the grave environmental and health threats posed by the world’s mounting accumulation of plastic. Called the URI Plastics: Land to Sea Initiative , this comprehensive new major research initiative aims to tackle what no single institution can do alone. Peter J. Snyder, URI vice president for research and economic development, opened the think tank meeting, noting that no singular effort “can make a large enough impact on the global production and environmental contamination of nondegradable plastics.” The issue, he added, is “highly complex and multi-faceted, and it is leading to serious challenges that face our state, our nation, and our world — challenges that are impacting our health, economy, environment and education.” To work across the spectrum, with governmental, non-profit, corporate, and international partners to address such a complex issue, Snyder said that in leading the charge, URI recognizes the need to harness the intellect of varied disciplines and talents that span the institution’s colleges. At the same time, the work must be tackled in a coordinated manner that is both inclusive and creative. Snyder said he envisions URI Plastics: Land to Sea as a first major research initiative that will bring together as many disciplines across the University’s colleges as possible. As a Land- and Sea-Grant institution, URI’s fall 2019 plastics retreat focused on both land- and sea-generated plastics and included

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