He posted a photo of the discharge on two Black Rock neighborhood Facebook pages, writing “This is disgusting.”
A week before Clough captured that photo, equipment malfunctioned at the Bridgeport West Side Water Pollution Control Facility. Fecal matter and other suspended solids spewed at two times the maximum limit allowed under a discharge permit issued through the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES). The state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) ordered the city to make all repairs and upgrades by 2039.
The West Side facility, the larger of two sewage treatment plants in the city, sends its treated waste through a 72-inch discharge pipe into Black Rock Harbor.
When the flow of waste and rainwater overwhelms the system, as it does several times a year, untreated sewage releases out of combined sewer overflow (CSO) pipes into the harbor. It sluggishly works its way to the open water of Long Island Sound. The plant also discharges partially treated waste during storms or equipment failures. Those discharges are called bypasses. Like the CSOs, the bypasses are legal and will remain so for decades.
Every 10 days, on average, a sewage discharge flows into the harbor, according to July 2014-July 2019 data from DEEP. There were 99 CSOs and the West Side plant bypassed partially treated waste 85 times. Overflows from the CSO pipes range between 100,000 gallons and 500,000 gallons. The legal plant bypasses ranged from 1 million to 16 million gallons.
Most of the overflows rush out during rainstorms, but residents interviewed said that they have seen regular overflow discharges for years on dry days and that they suspect West Side facility equipment malfunctions are the cause.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Sunbathers along Seabright Beach. The beach was closed to swimmers most of the summer.
The city’s sewage plant manager maintains that 99 CSO spills over five years is not a high number. “During a heavy rainstorm, depending on the intensity and duration, [the CSO pipes] can overflow,” said Lauren McBennett Mappa, general manager of the Bridgeport Water Pollution Control Authority. “The overflow is very diluted raw sewage that can overflow for a short period of time. This happens very rarely.”
Residents are unhappy that DEEP, as enforcer of federal clean-water laws, gave the city so many years to fix its overflow problems. Although DEEP’s records show that most overflows are legal, residents say they have witnessed other spills that they believe aren’t documented, such as the scene in Clough’s photo.
“People look in the water, and they’re just shocked,” said resident Bruce Williams, who runs his family’s Captain’s Cove Seaport, a complex of shops, a marina, and restaurant that also leases space to sailing teams. On a recent Sunday, he said, “People from Long Island were staring at it. It looks like a horror movie. They were just stunned.”
The Culprit: The Plant
Part of the problem is the way the West Side facility operates. The Bostwick Avenue plant, built in the 1940s and last upgraded in 1996, is three times larger than the city’s east side plant and handles the majority of the city’s waste. Stormwater and waste together are pumped into the plant, and then travel through treatment by gravity. On a dry day, 18 million gallons enter the plant, which is designed to handle 30 million gallons a day. On a wet day, as much as 90 million gallons can enter the plant’s main raw sewage pumps. Usually one pump operates, but in heavier flows, up to four pumps move the water.
Over a 12-hour period, the waste normally circulates through three screening tanks, where human feces, sanitary napkins, tampons, condoms and other items are screened out. Then the water enters tanks where the remaining solid material is allowed to settle to the bottom. These solids are later trucked to landfills. The water then continues to aeration tanks, where sprayers speed up the breakdown of bacteria. Next chlorine is added, and then bisulphate is added to dechlorinate the water.
But if a flow equal to more than 58 million gallons per day enters the plant, the facility enters “bypass mode,” which speeds up and eliminates some steps in the process. During this mode, the system screens out solids, chlorinates the water, dechlorinates it, and then discharges it. The level of rain that triggers a bypass depends entirely on the accumulated water level in the street. Some official documents list the amount of rain that triggers this as four-tenths of an inch in 24 hours.
Since last year, DEEP has issued two administrative correction orders to the city, including one in 2019 that addressed the April 2018 permit violations. A June 2018 order requires the city to stop all discharges out of its CSO pipes by 2039. Eleven projects separating stormwater pipes from sewage pipes must begin by 2021. Some of this work has begun. An order issued earlier this year sets deadlines for fixing sludge processing and nitrogen removal systems that malfunctioned earlier. Construction on those must begin by the end of 2022.
Floating Condoms
Captain’s Cove rents the city-owned waterfront across Bostwick Avenue from the West Side sewage plant. Williams’s office overlooks the sewage discharge pipe. “I’m here every day. This happens all the time. I will go down to check that no condoms or sanitary napkins are floating in the shipway.”
So much is unknown about health threats in this water. But human contact with fecal contamination can result in gastrointestinal sickness like norovirus, respiratory illness, ear and eye infections, and rashes, health experts report. Regular water-quality testing is geared to the swimming season at some public beaches.
Bridgeport tests some of its beaches for bacteria that can indicate fecal matter and therefore disease-causing microbes. Swimming beaches like the neighborhood’s Seabright Beach, about 200 yards from one of the CSO pipes and 800 yards from the main discharge pipe, were closed for swimming most of the summer. The nearby Seaside Park, one of the most popular destinations, was rated “D+” for high bacteria by Save the Sound, a program of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment.
‘Not Normal’
For 13 years, Kevin Blagys, who owns KB Dive Services, has been diving in Fairfield County waters. Wearing a wet suit and snorkel gear, and holding a scrub brush in one hand, he cleans the barnacles and particles off boat bottoms. As he swims underwater, he passes through striating sections of brown and clear water. Sometimes the visibility is so bad he can only see a few inches. As the summers progress, the quality of his work zones worsens with floating black mud and the combination of heat, sun and nitrogen that makes hypoxia—oxygen too low to support life. He then hauls out dead horseshoe crabs. In some years, he has steered his small boat through slicks of dead menhaden, fish that typically thrive on Connecticut’s coast.
Blagys, a native of Greenwich, has been frustrated for years by the water quality in Black Rock Harbor, where “we have a discharge pipe at the end of a dead-end harbor.”
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Kevin Blagys of Bridgeport, who owns KB Dive Services, lifts a dead horseshoe crab found in Captain’s Cove.
Living and working so near the discharge pipe gives people in the area a sense of the water’s condition, Blagys said. “The whole neighborhood knows when it’s gross and when it’s not normal.”
Bill Lucey, the Long Island Soundkeeper, a watchdog scientist for Save the Sound, has docked his research and education boat at Captain’s Cove since spring 2018. This year he tested for dissolved oxygen in the water near the sewage discharge. In mid-August he was recording oxygen saturations of 0, the result of nitrogen from the sewage discharge combined with heat and light. High levels of nitrogen result in harmful algae growth.
The harbor could handle some nitrogen, Lucey said, “but that is only OK if it’s being discharged into a pristine environment,” which Black Rock Harbor is not. “The whole system is overloaded.”
Lucey thinks nitrogen levels should be lower than they are, but Mappa said nitrogen tests at the plant’s outflow between July 29 and Aug. 2 were “all very good numbers.”
Everyone agrees Black Rock Harbor is polluted. Residents called Peter Spain, their 130th District City Council member. He organized a public information meeting on the plant’s permit, attended by Save the Sound, DEEP, business owners, and residents, including some students. Residents hoped to share their concerns, but DEEP engineer Ann Straut spoke for much of the reserved time in a local school auditorium. She explained in detail each step required to plan, approve, fix and check plant upgrades. Public questions were cut short. Lucey trimmed his presentation on the health of the water in Long Island Sound to a few minutes.
Residents, business owners and students had already decided to take part in a regional Unified Water Study of Long Island Sound, coordinated by the Connecticut Fund for the Environment. Spain helped fund the study out of his City Council stipend.
Although Blagys never got a chance to address the meeting, he said he would have told those in attendance, “I’ve maintained boats underwater throughout the [Black Rock Harbor] and western Long Island Sound, from Milford to Greenwich. Of all the harbors—like Milford and Norwalk and Southport—Black Rock Harbor stands alone. It is clearly the most stressed environment.”
Visit the Save the Sound, Sound Health Explorer to view bacteria levels and other information here.
Coming Thursday, Part 2: A catalog of West Side plant malfunctions and sewage discharges into Black Rock Harbor; how sewage problems persist in other cities.
Coming Friday, Part 3: Black Rock area residents, including high school students, spent the spring and summer cruising the harbor and Long Island Sound gathering water samples for testing. They’re part of the Long Island Sound Unified Water Study, and like many living and working in the area they’re tired of the smelly, brown-slick water and beaches closed to swimming.
This project was supported by a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists – Fund for Environmental Journalism.
How C-HIT’s Christine Woodside reported this project: Christine Woodside had long wanted to understand why sewage overflows regularly in some of Connecticut’s cities. She settled on the Bridgeport neighborhood of Black Rock, on Black Rock Harbor and near the promenades of Seaside Park. There she found recreation, industry, and local people who were getting tired of pollution. She went to Black Rock at least a dozen times between late March and late July. She read sewage plan documents. She scouted. She tagged along with citizen scientists collecting water. She sought out the overflow pipes with diver/boat cleaner Kevin Blagys. She wandered around the docks, streets, beaches, and markets. This gave her a sense of the residents’ anxieties and the enormity of the project to stop overflows.
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Charlotte Hickey grips a heavy cylindrical metal probe that is about a foot and a half long. The students call this “the beast.” It contains electronics that precisely measure water conditions. Sienna Matregrano holds a clipboard and pen, ready to record depth, temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, fluorescence and turbidity. Both girls are seniors at Bridgeport Regional Vocational Aquaculture School.
They’re up early because they must take water quality readings in Black Rock Harbor when it lies still. Like most residents of the Black Rock area, they’re tired of sewage overflows, smelly water and beaches closed to swimming—mostly caused by overflows at the Bridgeport West Side Water Pollution Control Facility sewer plant.
The students have devoted many early mornings of the spring and summer of 2019 volunteering as citizen scientists in a Long Island Sound-wide study of water quality. Called the Unified Water Study, the initiative is administered by Connecticut Fund for the Environment and its program Save the Sound. The Bridgeport group is one of 22 taking water samples at 36 embayments of Long Island Sound in Connecticut and New York.
The study’s goal is to understand the whole Sound’s water quality, and so the Black Rock citizen scientists follow strict guidelines. They take readings every two weeks in the same six locations from the mouth to the furthest inland stretch of Black Rock Harbor in the same way at the same time of day.
Under the director of teacher Holly Turner, Hickey has worked all of the collections. Matregrano rotates as data recorder with Lyle Given, a senior at the aquaculture high school.
Christine Woodside Photo.
Kevin Blagys, a study volunteer, and students Sienna Matregrano and Charlotte Hickey, both from Fairfield, check their equipment for testing.
Working with them is Kevin Blagys, who operates a one-man diving and salvage service in these waters. Blagys offered his boat, although often they use the school’s, and he helps check the figures. Blagys also has devoted hours to helping with the logistics of the study, and, using his own boat, collects seaweed and chlorophyll samples.
The last data collection is Oct. 18, so any results now are localized and don’t take into account the context of the greater Long Island Sound, which is how the unified study is designed. But the readings here in Black Rock indicate water with high nitrogen levels (because of the sewage effluent) and diminishing health as the warm season progresses.
Indeed, in their preliminary results the students are finding alarming proof of the poor health of the water. For a snapshot of declining health, one only has to compare readings from the first day the citizen scientists recorded conditions, May 10, with the readings three months later. Hypoxia, or too little oxygen to support most marine life, occurs when oxygen measures below 5 milligrams per liter. In Long Island Sound, high nitrogen levels from sewage treatment—even when plants are operating perfectly—is the cause of hypoxia.
At testing station 3, near Captain’s Cove Seaport, oxygen on the bottom declined from 100% on May 10 to 38% on Aug. 9. At the surface it went from 100% in May to 55% in August.
Farther inland, near Santa Energy and I-95, dissolved oxygen at the bottom went from 67% in May to 25% in August. At the surface it dropped from 99% in May to 30% in August.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Megan Dear, a volunteer working on the Soundkeeper’s boat, takes a sample at Jennings Beach, Fairfield.
At the harbor’s mouth, dissolved oxygen measured 100% on the bottom and at the surface in May. By August that went down to 45% on the bottom and 62% at the surface.
They test also for turbidity, or suspended particles in the water, which remains high.
And they test for chlorophyll, an indicator of plant life. As the season warms up, oxygen in the harbor is depleted, making it more difficult to sustain marine life. “The other staggering reading is the chlorophyll levels,” Blagys said in mid-August. “They greatly increase as we go up the harbor” inland.
Chlorophyll readings Blagys collected told a story too. “I was surprised at our first testing on the 10th [of May]. It was already very green,” Blagys said, although the water temperature was still in the 50s at that time. “The water’s alive.”
Meanwhile, Bill Lucey, the Long Island Soundkeeper for the Connecticut Fund for the Environment/Save the Sound, started testing Black Rock Harbor near the discharge pipe of the West Side facility in June.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Charlotte Hickey of Fairfield, a student at the Bridgeport Regional Vocational Aquaculture School, lowers “the beast” into the water.
His probe has measured dissolved oxygen at 0 from his first tests. Then sometime in July, what he calls “this big organic mat,” or blobs of black matter floating up from the bottom, began to clog his probe. “In a healthy embayment, the top few centimeters of the bottom sediment should have oxygen,” he said.
“There should be clams and worms making holes,” Lucey said. Deeper down you’d find anaerobic bacteria, which doesn’t need oxygen, he said.
Black Rock Harbor qualifies as an unhealthy embayment. The sediment near the top also lacks oxygen. The result is methane production on the bottom. The boaters docked near the discharge pipe see the bubbles bursting into patterns as they start their engines.
On the boat, the students, Turner and Blagys act as a well-oiled team. They’ve been doing this for months. The boat reaches the first test collection spot and hovers as Hickey lowers the beast into the water. Turner reads off the device that records the conditions, calling out figures to Matregrano, who writes them down on the study’s preprinted chart blanks.
As the boat moves to the next stop, Hickey and Turner pull the beast out of the water and go to the back of the boat to hose off blobs of thick, black mud.
Blagys said he “kind of literally jumped into this. After 13 years in business, diving in the harbor and seeing the state of it, and it really becomes in a crisis mode for two months for July and August with the hypoxia and the fish kills,” he said. He wanted to do something.
Melanie Stengel Photo.
Kevin Blagys, a nationally-ranked snowboader, volunteered his time and boat for the Unified Water Study of Long Island Sound. Here he shows seaweed that will be tested.
So did the other residents of Black Rock who attended a summer 2018 meeting organized by City Council member Peter Spain. “We found out about this study,” Blagys said. “It was pretty much Bill Lucey with Save the Sound and Holly Turner. They got together and said, ‘How can we run this thing?’ ”
“We’re sort of all citizen scientists,” Blagys said.
Blagys said he was eager to “give back” to the water where he makes his living, and is delighted that finally the water quality in the Black Rock area would get independent attention. “In the previous studies, the water hasn’t been monitored here in Bridgeport,” he said.
As soon as Turner told the students about the water study, Hickey signed up. She said that over the past three years the water in Black Rock Harbor looks more polluted than it ever has. She’s worked at Captain’s Cove with her family since she was in second grade. She sells her own cleverly painted shells—some look like Santa Claus—and she talks to a lot of tourists. Hickey’s family sells ice cream and runs a few other little stores on the boardwalk at Captains Cove Seaport. The brightly painted shops cluster over the well-kept boat docks. Music plays from the restaurant deck speakers at the northern end. You can smell fried seafood, french fries—and the sewage plant.
Since the West Side facility began operating in the late 1940s, residents have lived with regular flows of effluent (treated sewage).
Since the West Side facility began operating in the late 1940s, residents have lived with regular flows of effluent (treated sewage). The discharge pipe is designed to emit up to 30 million gallons a day, but it regularly sends out more out of its 72-inch mouth directly below Captain Cove’s restaurant deck.
When the study ends in October, residents may understand better the problems in this water. For now, they are noticing that the dissolved oxygen went way down as the summer went on and the water heated up. They see high nitrogen levels and high turbidity (cloudiness) in areas.
The Future
Bridgeport is under orders from the state to correct its sewage overflow problem by 2039. Once all the work is done, Lucey said, the harbor would need about 20 more years to recover. So if the city stops overflows by 2039, the harbor will be clean by 2059.
Waterways do recover when sewage outflows are moved. A case in point is Mumford Cove in Groton. The sewage outflow was moved to the Thames River in 1987. Fifteen years later, the cove’s natural eelgrass ecosystem had recovered.
Lucey said that Black Rock Harbor should be dredged so that it has a chance to recover, once the sewage overflows are halted.
The recovery in Black Rock rides, too, on other industry being careful. Over the summer, some spilled gravel caused the water to look as blue as a glacial lake for a day.
Climate change will also affect how the harbor recovers.
Connecticut is getting wetter and warmer, which means more rain will infiltrate sewage and stormwater pipes. Warmer summers increase the interactions of heat, sun and nitrogen that lower water oxygen levels.
The people in Black Rock have decided that whatever the odds against the harbor might seem to be, they want to do something. “We basically got the Unified Water Study started in Black Rock with no federal funding,” Lucey said. “They self-funded.”
Spain, Santa Energy, and Blagys donated time and boat time. The aquaculture high school donated its boat and captains. Ash Creek Conservation Association donated money and acted as the fiscal agent for buying equipment. Captain’s Cove provided free boat slips.
“A half dozen entities donated resources to make that happen,” Lucey said. “People put their money where their mouth is.”
Read the 3-part series on C-HIT.org.
Part 1: A typical rainstorm in Bridgeport overwhelms the West Side sewage treatment plant. Over the past five years, hundreds of millions of gallons of bypassed waste have poured into Black Rock Harbor. Combined sewage overflow pipes have diverted hundreds of thousands of gallons of untreated waste. A murky thick foam filled with objects people flushed down the toilet lingers for days. Residents say that they should not have to live with this.
Part 2: A catalog of West Side plant malfunctions and discharges into Black Rock Harbor; how sewage problems persist in other cities.
Part 3: Black Rock area residents, including high school students, spent the spring and summer cruising the harbor and Long Island Sound gathering water samples for testing. They’re part of the Long Island Sound Unified Water Study, and like many living and working in the area they’re tired of the smelly, brown-slick water and beaches closed to swimming.
This project was supported by a grant from the Society of Environmental Journalists – Fund for Environmental Journalism.
How C-HIT’s Christine Woodside reported this project: Christine Woodside had long wanted to understand why sewage overflows regularly in some of Connecticut’s cities. She settled on the Bridgeport neighborhood of Black Rock, on Black Rock Harbor and near the promenades of Seaside Park. There she found recreation, industry, and local people who were getting tired of pollution. She went to Black Rock at least a dozen times between late March and late July. She read sewage plan documents. She scouted. She tagged along with citizen scientists collecting water. She sought out the overflow pipes with diver/boat cleaner Kevin Blagys. She wandered around the docks, streets, beaches, and markets. This gave her a sense of the residents’ anxieties and the enormity of the project to stop overflows.
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These oysters came here from nearby Mason’s Crab Cove and serve as the resident population for lab studies that Ward, a professor of marine sciences, conducts at the University of Connecticut Avery Point. He studies these and other oysters and sediment gathered on boats operated by Norm Bloom and Sons of Norwalk.
Christine Woodside Photo.
J. Evan Ward examines oysters hauled from the dock at UConn Avery Point.
Oysters are master water filterers. A single oyster can filter up to 1.3 gallons of water per hour. They process much of what ends up in Long Island Sound. That includes the ever-increasing load of tiny pieces of waste plastic. Some of this ends up in their bodies.
New England’s great oyster markets appear so far to have escaped large plastic contamination. Oysters collected by Ward’s team contain fewer plastic pieces than one might expect—8 to 10 pieces per oyster, he said.
Oysters likely encounter more plastic than that but will spit out pieces larger than 1 millimeter, Ward said. Although oysters today contain few plastics, their bodies will encounter, and probably accumulate, much more than this because people are discarding more and more plastic every year.
Our throwaway society has created much of the microplastics problem. Around the world broken-up pieces of plastic waste, pieces from a few millimeters in size to so small that they can’t be seen, wash into waterways and oceans.
They enter water supplies, food, the guts of marine animals, fish, and shellfish and humans. Scientists don’t know all the ways they enter the water, or how they harm the environment or people. Early results show that these fragments are everywhere.
“We’re really behind in the United States,” Ward said. “We are very much behind. The Europeans have much more money to study this.”
The effect of microplastics on human health remains largely unknown. King’s College London scientist Stephanie L. Wright wrote in a study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology: “Chronic exposure is anticipated to be of greater concern due to the accumulative effect that could occur. This is expected to be dose-dependent, and a robust evidence-base of exposure levels is currently lacking.” In other words, the more plastics in the environment, the higher the threat.
Photo Courtesy Ward/UConn.
J. Evan Ward and graduate student Kayla Mladinich wait for material to settle out of the water they collected near oyster beds.
Plastic particles travel and accumulate in the human body, especially in lymph nodes and around joint replacements. They can carry harmful chemicals that attach to them in the ocean. They can cause immune system problems. Airborne particles like nylon can lodge in the lungs, causing breathing disorders.
Plastic pieces lodge in the intestinal tracts and tissues of oysters, clams, mussels and scallops, which humans eat whole. In studies of sand and gravel and mussels collected at Avery Point in Groton, Ward and three other scientists found microplastics in 73 percent of the sand and gravel samples and in all of the mussels they collected. These findings were published in Environmental Science & Technology in August.
Scientists know that plastic pieces find their way into drinking water, sea salt and even beer. University of Minnesota public health scientist Mary Kosuth and her colleagues documented small plastic particles in all three in the Great Lakes region.
“The microplastics just keep on getting smaller and smaller and smaller,” Kosuth said. “They don’t biodegrade.”
Plastic that breaks into pieces includes synthetic clothing fibers, water bottles, cups and cup lids, straws, plastic bags and microbeads—the tiny bits of plastic mainly used in exfoliating body washes and facial scrubs. The federal Microbead-Free Waters Act of 2015 halted the manufacturing of microbeads in cosmetics in 2017 and over-the-counter medicine last year, but the microbeads in medicine can still be sold until next year.
“There are a lot of them out there still,” Ward said.
For several years now, people have heard about the “great Pacific garbage patch.”Despite how we might envision it, the “patch” consists of swirling wastelands of very tiny pieces, said Marcus Eriksen, a scientist, activist and author of Junk Raft, who saw some of the plastic gyres while floating with Joel Paschel across the Pacific Ocean in a raft made of old plastic bottles. Eriksen said plastics’ effect on human health represents a new frontier for science. “It’s really everywhere, but does it cause harm? We don’t know for sure.”
Most of the plastics in the ocean come from single-use objects and containers, and the rest from fishing gear. The tiny particles are easy for marine life to take in, and scientists worry about polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), the insecticide dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) and other chemicals plastics absorb. Eriksen said eventually plastics will be found sunken to the ocean floor, washed ashore, or “excreted and deposited as sediment.”
China is the No. 1 contributor of plastic washing into waterways, and the United States is 20th, according to a study published three years ago in the journal Science. That study estimated that 192 coastal countries contribute between 4.8 to 12.7 million metric tons of plastic to the oceans every year. Without some way to stop the waste, it will greatly increase by 2025, the authors wrote. Eriksen said the plastic waste amounts to 5.25 trillion pieces. “Ninety-two percent are smaller than a grain of rice,” he said in an email interview.
Plastic is so ubiquitous in daily life, Ward said, that “you’re also eating a lot of microplastics every morning when you take off your fuzzy synthetic sweater over your coffee and it’s raining into your coffee.”
Carl Jordan Castro Photo.
Stephen Urchick, 24, stuffs a handful of plastic bottles and 6-pack rings into a garbage bag. Urchick volunteered to help clean Long Wharf as part of the Save the Sound program run by the Connecticut Fund for the Environment.
And it’s not just microplastics that affect marine life. It’s estimated that over 1 billion plastic bags are used annually, and more than 100,000 end up in Long Island Sound each year. Three Connecticut towns have banned plastic bags in their stores: Westport’s ban took effect in 2009, Greenwich’s ban started in September and Stamford’s ban takes effect in April 2019. Other communities are considering similar bans on plastic and some are looking at banning plastic straws too.
Denise Savageau, Greenwich’s retired conservation director who has been active in the plastic-reducing movement, said many residents worry that using plastics along the coast harms the environment. “There’s so much plastic on the bed in Long Island Sound, it’s just incredible,” she said.
Savageau said people are confused when they see plastics labeled “biodegradable” or “degradable.” These plastics don’t actually break down, she said, but instead fragment into tiny pieces. With the exception of a few cornstarch-based materials labeled “compostable,” plastic doesn’t degrade, she said.
Richard Harris, a marine scientist for Norm Bloom and Sons, said they are not hearing any concerns so far from the public about plastic. But he said the company is relieved that microbeads are being phased out this year. “There are no alarm bells going off, but if we continue on our present course, I’m sure we will be.”
For now, Ward said, he continues to enjoy the mollusks he studies so closely.
“Do I eat mussels and oysters? Yes. Am I concerned about the number of plastics in mussels and oysters? No, in 2018,” he said.
But about the future, he’s unsure. “Will our kids be able to eat them?” he asked.
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