As if toxic algal blooms aren’t bad enough by themselves, the emergence of microplastic pollution in Lake Erie has the potential of making them worse.
A new research paper suggests that those billions of free-flowing bits and pieces of plastic, some too small for the human eye to see, might be giving algae particles more surface area to bind onto inside the lake.
“It’s how the plastic provides a surface, and how that adds to proliferation of the blooms,” Sherri “Sam” Mason, a nationally known microplastics researcher based at Gannon University in Erie, Pa., said in explaining the theory…