The David Attenborough Effect

Description

Plastics are central to modern living, supporting innovations in manufacturing, health care and construction. However, since the onset of mass production of plastics in the 1950s close to 5000 Mt (>60%) of all plastics ever produced have been discarded and are accumulating in landfills or in the natural environment.

As such plastics, and their derived products, are now pervasive within all earth surface systems; they are present in the air that we breathe, in soils, throughout aquatic biota and have even been found in the most remote polar oceans and deepest abyssal trenches.

Despite this global distribution we lack the knowledge and data to quantify the sources, exchanges, modification, and hence fate, of plastics in response to changes in the biophysical environment.

This talk will concentrate on understanding the controls on movement of microplastics (plastics particles<5mm) through soil and river systems due to both aeolian and fluvial processes before considering whether plastics can be modelled analogously to natural sediments.