Plastic Pollution in Oceans and Land

“We must look to land-based sources of plastic to the environment to make a meaningful impact on global plastic pollution.”

- Dr Rachel Hurley

Dr Rachel Hurley, Research Scientist at Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA) is an expert in dynamics related to microplastic contamination, and has been leading the micro- and macro-plastic sampling efforts under the INOPOL project, including developing suitable methodologies based on field visits in Gujarat, India. Here, she is in an exclusive email conversation with us for TerraGreen.

Please let us know about NIVA’s role in researching the plastic pollution problem.

NIVA began researching plastic pollution in 2013 and since then we have established a large and diverse team of researchers that work on numerous projects addressing many different aspects of the problem. We have a dedicated plastic laboratory and expertise in monitoring plastics and microplastic in the environment and using different analytical approaches to detect microplastics in different environmental samples. NIVA were amongst the first to begin developing innovative standard reference materials for microplastics, which have been used in several international interlaboratory comparison exercises. NIVA is now at the forefront of efforts to harmonize microplastic methods and the data that they generate. NIVA takes the perspective of working in all parts of the environment—from the mountains to the oceans—and tracking interconnected processes throughout. This is a valuable position when working in plastic research, as plastic and microplastic can now be found all over the globe. We can’t focus in just one place to fix the whole problem and it is useful to be able to work with natural and social scientists from diverse backgrounds to better understand the scale of the problem and how best to tackle it.