Plastic finding its way into fish flesh and our food chain

PLASTICS found in fish are entering the human food chain, research supported by a Mountshannon academic has confirmed.

Dr Alvin Orbaek White, who works at Swansea University, has just released the findings of a project he supported in Barcelona, which involved a boat-builder and marine biologist catching and examining fish for the presence of plastics.

The work was inspired by an idea from artist and boat builder, Mark Redden, with laboratory experiments and scuba diving instructions from marine biologist, Charlie Gaborit.

With an estimated 51 trillion micro plastic pieces in the sea, the team of young entrepreneurs and scientists went out in a traditional currach as part of a short scale experiment looking at how micro plastics affect fish stocks and can then enter the human food chain. The work was sponsored by Dr Orbaek White’s start-up TrimTabs.

The team’s work was project managed and filmed by Clément Esso and a video, just released, graphically illustrates the plastics problem.

“For every three people on the planet, there’s at least two tonnes of plastic waste in the environment,” Dr White said. “Plastics recycling can be relatively efficient but the challenge really isn’t about efficiency, it’s about effectiveness.

“The reality in which we live every day is that plastics get mixed and they’re often dirty and this is the real issue. I was aware of the presence of micro plastics and that’s what made me interested in this project. I had no idea that you’d find it inside the flesh of the fish.”

Gaborit, CEO of L’Académie Moderne, outlined how the work was conducted.

“We divided the lab into two different spaces – the first to do the dissection and the second part was for observation,” he outlined.

“We took all the stomach contents and muscles of the fish to one part and we’re looking at them under the microscope.

“My first observation was pretty surprising and very scary. When we went fishing, and when we went diving, we see plastic.

“When a human will eat this plastic, they’ll also have a small component that will go into your body. We haven’t yet reached the tipping point. We have to change to a different level. We have to do more ecological tourism, where somebody goes scuba diving and at the same time, tries to clean.”

Mr Redden expressed his shock at the findings.

“I love fish,” he said. “I love eating fish. I did love eating fish. This is very disturbing news and it’s very important that anyone who eats fish knows this information.

“I think the best way to deal with this problem is through people becoming aware of exactly what’s going on in our ecosystem. It has to happen at home first, by good example, and bringing that in to the village and from there, bringing it into the world. It all starts at home.”

Dr Orbaek White has pioneered a technology that changes waste plastic into valuable compounds for the energy industries, reducing plastics pollution in the process.

The research will be instrumental in addressing the global transition to more efficient, cleaner energy resources and providing a new life for waste plastics, keeping them out of land and sea.

“We’ve got three basic solutions,” he said, referring to waste plastics.

“Either you pile them up in landfill, you burn them or you recycle them. If you recycle them, you’ve got two different options.

“On the one hand, you’ve got the ability to do physical recycling. On the second hand, you can do chemical recycling, where you treat the plastics as a chemical ingredient to make new materials and that’s what we do at TrimTabs.

“We turn [plastic] into carbon nanotubes. They’re light-weight, high-strength materials that conduct electricity.”

Dr Orbaek White is a past pupil of Waldorf Steiner School in Tuamgraney and Scariff Community College. He studied at NUI Galway where he undertook his Bachelor’s degree, before obtaining a PhD at Rice University in Huston, Texas.

His first scientific publication elaborated on the conversion of black plastic material that he purchased in a local supermarket. Dr Orbaek White later founded TrimTabs, an engineering firm creating technology solutions for positive global impact.

A senior lecturer in Chemical Engineering, Dr Orbaek White, who was recruited to Wales from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as part of the Wales Rising Star program as a Sêr Cymru II Fellow, is leading the research group at the Energy Safety Research Institute in Swansea University.