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The revelatory moment came for Melissa Omand when she, a physical oceanographer by training, saw her husband, Ben, struggling to develop an ocean sensor instrument without using plastics, expending effort for a device and racking up costs as he tested alternative materials. “And the instruments were pretty much a failure,” she recalls. “It is so painful when you’re on a research vessel and these tools don’t work the way you expect.” Omand, associate professor of oceanography at the University of Rhode Island, knew there was a better way to design and construct marine tools that would not contribute to the pollution of water bodies they were made to measure.

MELISSA ORMAND Associate Professor Oceanography

PLASTIC PROBLEMS According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), eight to 10 million tons of plastic each year end up in the world’s oceans. By 2050 the oceans will contain more pieces of plastic than fish in the seas. Additionally, most research examines how plastics collect and pollute the sea surface. Little is known about their impact on the deep ocean, and standards (set by organizations like the American Society of Safety Professionals) for measuring degradation rates do not account for their breaking down in cold, dark environments. “All of the focus for measuring degradation is set at 20 degrees Celsius in shallow water environments, but 99 percent of the ocean is deep and cold,” says Omand.

The big question for Omand is: Can we design a biomaterial purpose-built for ocean degradation and make it available for anyone using marine tools, from oyster aquaculturalists and fishermen to oceanographers like herself deploying a myriad of expendable sensors across the world? The answer became clearer in 2019 when Omand met Alyson Santoro, a marine biologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara. “We had a conversation about how to make floats I was designing more sustainable, and she suggested that maybe we could add microbes or other naturally occurring compounds like nutrients that would break them down,” she explains. Unfortunately for Omand, an important component of her MINION floats was made out of polylactic acid (PLA), a polymer found in almost any biodegradable plastic. PLA breaks down in only highly controlled waste facilities where temperatures reach 55 degrees

MINION floats, glass tubes containing sensors to measure the flow of carbon throughout the ocean’s water columns.

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