URI_Research _Magazine_Momentum_Spring_2020_Melissa-McCarthy

From food wrappings and technology packaging, to disposable water bottles, straws, and grocery bags, our lives are overtaken by a tide of plastics — many of which we toss away with impunity after a single use. We have all heard harrowing reports of the effects of the increasing presence of plastics accumulating in our oceans. We have all seen heart-wrenching images or videos of marine life ensnared in or impaled by plastic debris. In reality, 8 million metric tons of plastic are dumped in the ocean annually, and this excess impacts at least 700 marine and wildlife species. URI students Samantha Reynolds ’20, Erin Yabroudy ’21, and Aaron Shaheen ’20, took these matters into their own hands and into the hands of their peers. For them, this issue is much more than another passing news story, and it has inspired a student community effort. Reynolds, Yabroudy, and Shaheen led a fundraising campaign within URI’s Greek Life system to collectively raise $35,000 to support the URI plastics research initiative. The three student leaders all possess philanthropic and fundraising experience, developed both prior to their arrivals at URI and during their work as members of their respective sorority or fraternity chapters on campus. Much of the fundraising took place during the 2019 Greek Life Philanthropy Week. This extraordinary gift from the URI Panhellenic Society and Interfraternity Councils to the URI Plastics Initiative will support an overarching, multidisciplinary plastics and microplastics research project. The funds directly support URI academic researchers working to establish a standardized method for testing for plastics from shore to the sea floor. The work will start on a small scale, in Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, but the scientists involved are already thinking URI undergraduate students, Michael Ludwig and Erin Devin, participating in a J-Term field school course in St. George’s Caye, one of the many barrier islands off the coast of Belize. Taking a break from their marine archaeology and research diving course, they and their classmates took time to collect plastic trash from the nearby beach. The athletic sneaker in the foreground is especially problematic - if not impossible to recycle - as it is constructed from multiple types of non-degradable plastics that are permanently bonded together. Photo by Peter J. Snyder.

URI’s New Initiative, Plastics: Land to Sea and the Greek Life Gift

written by ARIA MIA LOBERTI ‘20

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