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EACH YEAR RESEARCH INDICATES THE AMOUNT OF PLASTICS MANUFACTURED AND POSSIBLY HEADED TO THE WORLD’S OCEANS CONTINUE TO RISE.

Photo by Jason Jaacks

[consumer] choices in the future,” Suckling said. Students can also draw on the experience during job interviews when employers ask about lab techniques. The professor herself also learns as the field advances. Each year she updates the course curriculum to keep pace with the latest laboratory standards. And each year research indicates the amount of plastics manufactured and possibly headed to the world’s oceans continue to rise. For Suckling it means many more trips to the Bay and gearing up with other researchers around the world looking at environmental plastics and their impacts on marine ecosystems. Then hours back in the lab analyzing their contents. “It’s fascinating but it’s such a shame that we have to study it,” she said. “It’s extremely sad that so much plastic pollution is in the water.”

Because most plastic eventually sinks to the bottom of the seabed,

Suckling seeks answers by looking at animals living on the seabed such as oysters – a critically important ecological species to Narragansett Bay and economically to the state.

URI Initiative Plastics: Land to Sea SPRING | 2021 Page 39