Question: why of all the topics in science do you study rubbish

Nicolas Biber answered on 15 Jun 2011:

I’m really chuckling at the sound of this question 🙂 I know it seems like a very unlikely study topic that nobody would really like to choose.
I chose rubbish because I was brought up to never throw anything on the floor, and I have always seen that this makes sense. Still I see lots of people just throwing rubbish on the floor. And already when I was a kid I realised that rubbish that is not disposed of properly will stay in the environment and look nasty. Later I also realised that rubbish can actually cause harm if animals eat it, and even later when I was at university I was told about animals at sea that get trapped in rubbish and suffocate or just can’t move anymore and starve to death. But deep inside me I have always had the feeling that it was just wrong to throw stuff on the floor and it still bothers me a lot when people do it.
Then one teacher told us that recently plastic was discovered to break down into tiny bits over time when it’s released in the environment. We call these tiny bits microplastics. I found this really scary, because even though they are there we cannot see them anymore. And microplastics are so small that they can be eaten by very small animals and even travel from their guts into their body tissue. Because now even very small animals suffer from plastics, all the larger animals that eat the smaller ones are also affected. That’s why microplastics may be a very important problem. And because all plastics will eventually turn into microplastics this is something we have to worry about. The sea is really big, and it doesn’t seem like this plastic would ever have an effect in there. But the plastic that gets into the sea every year weighs as much as several million cars, so maybe it will have an effect after all.
I am just concerned with the problems humans cause to the environment, and I want humans to be educated to be more careful about that. And to educate them we need information, and that’s what I’m working on.