Win Colton Cowger

Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research

Microplastic research is a rapidly developing field, with urgent needs for high throughput and automated analysis techniques. We conducted a review covering image analysis from optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, fluorescence microscopy, and spectral analysis from Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, py...

River flow is a major conveyance of microplastic (1−5000 μm) pollution from land to marine systems. However, the current approaches to monitoring and modeling fluvial transport of microplastic pollution have primarily relied on sampling the surface of flow and assumptions about microplastic concentration depth profiles to estimate the depth-average...

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....

Urban areas are the primary source of human-made litter globally, and roadsides are a primary accumulation location. This study aimed to investigate how litter arrives at roadsides and determine the accumulation rate and composition of roadside litter. We monitored select roadsides in the Inland Empire, California, for litter abundance (count) and...

Despite global efforts to monitor, mitigate against, and prevent trash (mismanaged solid waste) pollution, no harmonized trash typology system has been widely adopted worldwide. This impedes the merging of datasets and comparative analyses. We addressed this problem by 1) assessing the state of trash typology and comparability, 2) developing a stan...

Plastic removal technologies can temporarily mitigate plastic accumulation at local scales, but evidence based criteria are needed in policies to ensure that they are feasible and that ecological benefits outweigh the costs. To reduce plastic pollution efficiently and economically, policy should prioritize regulating and reducing upstream productio...

Plastic pollution is distributed patchily around the world’s oceans. Likewise, marine organisms that are vulnerable to plastic ingestion or entanglement have uneven distributions. Understanding where wildlife encounters plastic is crucial for targeting research and mitigation. Oceanic seabirds, particularly petrels, frequently ingest plastic, are h...

FTIR spectral identification is today's gold standard analytical procedure for plastic pollution material characterization. High-throughput FTIR techniques have been advanced for small microplastics (10 um - 500 um) but less so for large microplastics (500 um - 5 mm) and macroplastics (> 5 mm). These larger plastics are typically analyzed using ATR...

Microplastic (MP) pollution is a major global issue that poses serious threats to aquatic organisms. Although research on MP pollution has been extensive, the relationship between MPs and water quality parameters in estuarine water systems is unclear. This work studied the spatiotemporal distribution and characteristics of MPs in the Karnaphuli Riv...

As global awareness, science, and policy interventions for plastic escalate, institutions around the world are seeking preventative strategies. Central to this is the need for precise global time series of plastic pollution with which we can assess whether implemented policies are effective, but at present we lack these data. To address this need,...

California is one of the only states actively managing trash in its rivers. Several community groups in Pinole, CA, USA collaborated on a Thriving Earth Exchange community science project. Its purpose was to assess the trash in Pinole Creek and identify policy development opportunities for the community. The key scientific questions were: how much...

Study region The Santa Ana River middle reach, a small coastal urban catchment in Southern California, USA experiences a Mediterranean climate and lowflows dominated by wastewater effluent. Study focus River macroplastic flux can inform watershed management of plastic pollution. However, continuous macroplastic monitoring is not possible, so conce...

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...

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...

Children spend many hours in urban parks and playgrounds, where the tree canopy could filter microplastics released from the surrounding urban hotspots. However, the majority of children's playgrounds also contain plastic structures that could potentially release microplastics in situ. Yet, no study to date has quantified microplastic concentration...

Stormwater treatment systems remove and accumulate microplastics from surface runoff, but some of them can be moved downward to groundwater by natural freeze-thaw cycles. Yet, it is unclear whether or how microplastic properties such as density could affect the extent to which freeze-thaw cycles would move microplastics in the subsurface. To examin...

The rapid growth in microplastic pollution research is influencing funding priorities, environmental policy, and public perceptions of risks to water quality and environmental and human health. Ensuring that environmental microplastics research data are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) is essential to inform policy and mitig...

Region Ventura River watershed, California, USA Focus After wildfire, small mountainous watersheds can produce dramatic increases in fluvial sediment transport, but these changes are often evaluated under the assumption of stationary pre-fire sediment dynamics. The objectives of this study were to investigate temporal dependence in the fine (silt...

Although the study of microplastics in the aquatic environment incorporates a diversity of research fields, it is still in its infancy in many aspects while comparable topics have been studied in other disciplines for decades. In particular, extensive research in sedimentology can provide valuable insights to guide future microplastics research. To...

Urban areas are the primary source of human-made litter to the global environment, and roadsides are a primary accumulation location in urban areas. The goal of this study was to investigate how litter arrives at roadsides and what can be done to prevent it. We monitored roadsides in the Inland Empire, California for litter abundance (count) and co...

Presentation video: https://youtu.be/ymPMYkcmgDg Microplastics are one of the most diverse and complicated classes of environmental contaminants. The Microplastics contaminant suite includes particles with thousands of unique polymer types, ranging in size from nanometers to millimeters, a continuum of shapes, densities, known and unknown associat...

Microplastics is one of the most diverse and complicated contaminant suites- encompassing 6 orders of magnitude in size (nanometer to millimeter), hundreds of unique polymer types, a continuum of shapes, densities, associated contaminants, and more. Despite there being >200 independent toxicity studies on >150 unique species, many fundamental quest...

Microplastic is exposed to numerous weathering processes in the environment, which change particle properties and thus influence transport behaviors, including settling and rising velocities in aquatic environments. However, the extent to which particles in the environment differ from virgin particles in their transport behaviors has not yet been i...

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...

This paper demonstrates CleanUpOurWorld; a research spatial database that is designed and deployed to collect, process, query, and visualize anthropogenic litter data. Such data has a significant importance in the field of environmental sciences due to its important use cases. We make a major on-going effort to collect and maintain such data worldw...

Wastewater effluent is a prevalent source of contaminants of emerging concern in aquatic environments, including plastic pollution. A wide range of monitoring and analytical techniques to assess the contribution of wastewater derived microplastic pollution have been employed over the past two decades. The goal of this report is to critically evalua...