Hannah De Frond

University of Toronto | U of T · Ecology and Evoluntionary Biology

The amount of household waste produced worldwide is increasing every year. In combination with other actions to reduce waste production and improve waste management, community engagement and community‐focused programs are needed to motivate the public to change their behavior in such a way that reduces their waste generation and increases the accur...

We conducted a nationally-representative survey of United States (U.S.) adults (n=1,960) in 2021 to gather insights on the knowledge, perceptions, and concerns about threats to the ocean, with a specific focus on plastics and microplastic pollution. Responses from the U.S. adult survey group were compared to a group of highly-engaged, Ocean Conserv...

As the global plastics crisis grows, numerous technologies have been invented and implemented to recover plastic pollution from the environment. Although laudable, unregulated clean-up technologies may be inefficient and have unintended negative consequences on ecosystems, for example, through bycatch or removal of organic matter important for ecos...

Previous studies have evaluated method performance for quantifying and characterizing microplastics in clean water, but little is known about the efficacy of procedures used to extract microplastics from complex matrices. Here we provided 15 laboratories with samples representing four matrices (i.e., drinking water, fish tissue, sediment, and surfa...

Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) and Raman microspectroscopy are methods applied in microplastics research to determine the chemical identity of microplastics. These techniques enable quantification of microplastic particles across various matrices. Previous work has highlighted the benefits and limitations of each method and found these to be com...

Chemical identification of microplastics is time-consuming, especially when particles are numerous. To save resources, a subsample of particles is often selected for chemical identification. Because no standard subsampling protocols currently exist, methods vary widely and often lack evidence of representativeness, limiting conclusions and cross-st...

Microscopy is often the first step in microplastic analysis and is generally followed by spectroscopy to confirm material type. The value of microscopy lies in its ability to provide count, size, color, and morphological information to inform toxicity and source apportionment. To assess the accuracy and precision of microscopy, we conducted a metho...

Pathways for microplastics to aquatic ecosystems include agricultural runoff, urban runoff, and treated or untreated wastewater. To better understand the importance of each pathway as a vector for microplastics into waterbodies and for mitigation, we sampled agricultural runoff, urban stormwater runoff, treated wastewater effluent, and the waterbod...

Throughout the past decade, many studies have reported adverse effects in biota following microplastic exposure. Yet, the field is still emerging as the current understanding of microplastic toxicity is limited. At the same time, recent legislative mandates have required environmental regulators to devise strategies to mitigate microplastic polluti...

California Senate Bill 1422 requires the development of State-approved standardized methods for quantifying and characterizing microplastics in drinking water. Accordingly, we led an interlaboratory microplastic method evaluation study, with 22 participating laboratories from six countries, to evaluate the performance of widely used methods: sample...

Microplastic pollution research has suffered from inadequate data and tools for spectral (Raman and infrared) classification. Spectral matching tools often are not accurate for microplastics identification and are cost-prohibitive. Lack of accuracy stems from the diversity of microplastic pollutants, which are not represented in spectral libraries....

Microplastics are an emerging contaminant of high environmental concern due to their widespread distribution and availability to aquatic organisms. Filter-feeding organisms like bivalves have been identified as particularly susceptible to microplastics, and because of this, it has been suggested bivalves could be useful bioindicators of microplasti...

A mess of plastic It is not clear what strategies will be most effective in mitigating harm from the global problem of plastic pollution. Borrelle et al. and Lau et al. discuss possible solutions and their impacts. Both groups found that substantial reductions in plastic-waste generation can be made in the coming decades with immediate, concerted,...

The ubiquitous pollution of the environment with microplastics, a diverse suite of contaminants, is of growing concern for science and currently receives considerable public, political, and academic attention. The potential impact of microplastics in the environment has prompted a great deal of research in recent years. Many diverse methods have be...

Microplastics (MP) are of major concerns for the society and currently in the focus of legislators and administrations. A small number of measures to reduce or remove primary sources of MP to the environment are currently coming into effect. At the moment, they have not yet tackled important topics such as food safety. However, recent developments...

As smaller particle sizes are increasingly included in microplastic research, it is critical to chemically characterize microparticles to identify whether particles are indeed microplastics. To increase the accessibility of methods for characterizing microparticles via Raman spectroscopy, we created an application-based library of Raman spectroscop...

Plastic pollution in the marine environment is well documented. What remains less recognized and understood are the chemicals associated with it. Plastics enter the ocean with unreacted monomers, oligomers and additives, which can leach over time. Moreover, plastics sorb organic and inorganic chemicals from surrounding seawater, e.g., polychlorinat...

Expanded polystyrene (EPS) products and their associated chemicals (e.g., styrenes) are widespread in the marine environment. As a consequence, bans on their use for single-use packaging materials are being proposed in several municipalities. To better understand how science can inform decision-making, we looked at the available scientific literatu...