Microbeads made of plastic, shown here in comparison to a penny, can no longer be used in personal care products sold in the United States.Sherrie "Sam" Mason

CLEVELAND, Ohio – Something potentially harmful has been invading Lake Erie, the source of our drinking water, for years, and scientists aren’t sure what to make of it.

That something is tiny bits of plastic, billions and billions of them, and their threat to human health is still a big unknown.

That makes what Ohio State University professor John Lenhart plans to do – use a $150,000 grant to test drinking water in Cleveland and elsewhere for the tiny specs of plastic – all the more important.

“We could learn some pretty fundamental things,” he said, about the ability of municipalities to remove the inorganic contaminants from drinking water.

Lenhart, who teaches environmental engineering and is co-director of the Ohio Water Resources Center at Ohio State, will spend two years gathering data to determine how well the Cleveland Water Department and others who rely on Lake Erie for their drinking water are able to remove tiny microplastics during the treatment process.

Microplastics, which are about the size of a sesame seed or smaller, are found in Lake Erie and throughout the world – in water, on land and in the air – but there’s still a lot to be learned about how they get there, how they are affecting humans and animals, and what can be done about them.

“We’re just trying to better understand whether it’s an issue or not,” Lenhart said.

Lenhart’s plan is to test water samples in Cleveland and at least two other Ohio communities, Ottawa County and the city of Oregon, who also pull water from the lake before treating it and piping it to their customers.

He is particularly interested in the tiniest of fragments – called nanoplastics - that are no larger than a micron and invisible to the naked eye, but considered more of a health concern than larger microplastics because of their ability to pass through cell membranes in the body. For comparison’s sake, a single red blood cell is about eight microns.

“There’s the health concern and there’s just the fact that it’s not really known how well they’re removed,” he said in explaining his reasons for the study.

Lenhart and an intern will develop a method to identify different kinds of plastic in the water and to measure their concentrations before and after the water is treated.

In the second year of the project, the plan is to take samples at different stages of the treatment process to determine when removal of nanoplastics might be most effective.

The Cleveland Water Department welcomes the research as it could potentially lead to established standards for removing microplastics, said Scott Moegling, the department’s water quality manager.

It’s not known how well the water plants remove microplastics, he said, especially the smaller ones that Lenhart will be researching.

“Is what we have right now, is that adequate for treating microplastics?” Moegling asked rhetorically.

Ohio Sea Grant, which is part of the National Sea Grant program administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is providing the grant, which also will allow for the creation of a high school curriculum around the results of the project.

Microplastics can be bits of plastic that were purposely made that size, such as the microbeads once used in personal care products. But they are far more likely the result of larger plastic products such as water bottles, jugs, bags and clothing being broken down over time.

While most plastics these days are taken to landfills – only an estimated 9% is recycled – a lot of it winds up being discarded into the environment. A plastic bottle may get tossed out a car window or a plastic bag blown away by the wind.

These items are then broken down over time through a process called photo degradation, said Jill Bartolotta, an extension educator with Ohio Sea Grant based in Painesville. When plastic is exposed to ultra-violet rays from the sun it causes the chemical bonds to weaken, she said. And once in Lake Erie the brittle plastic gets pounded by the waves and against rocks, breaking it into micro-fragments.

Garments made of plastic fibers such as polyethylene and polypropylene also shed during the wash process and microfibers find their way into sanitary sewers and ultimately Lake Erie, she said. Thousands of microfibers can peel off during a single wash depending on the temperature of the water and the age of the garment, Bartolotta said.

The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District’s wastewater treatment plants remove microplastics that settle to the bottom of their tanks, but likely miss those that are suspended in the flow because the microrganisms that treat the water only eat organic material, district spokeswoman Jenn Elting.

In recognition of the problem, a federal law passed in 2015 prevents U.S. manufacturers from putting microbeads in products such as toothpaste, body wash and cosmetics, and retailers can no longer place such items on their shelves.

Plastics have been a source of pollution since they were first developed “we just didn’t know about it,” said Sherrii “Sam” Mason, an associate research professor and director of sustainability at Penn State Behrend in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Since 1950, billions and billions of tons of plastics have been produced globally, she said, and in the early 1970s, they were found to be collecting in the world’s oceans.

“It wasn’t really until the end of the 1990s that this really kind of captured peoples’ attention,” Mason said, and that was after a boat captain named Charles Moore discovered a floating mass of plastic in the Pacific Ocean that has become known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

The patch was formed by a system of circulating currents known as a gyre that creates a whirlpool effect, Mason said. There are five primary gyres, two in the Pacific, two in the Atlantic and one in the Indian Ocean.

“Debris drifts into these areas and, due to the region’s lack of movement, can accumulate for years,” states the National Geographic Resource Library. “These regions are called garbage patches.”

Inspired by her knowledge of the Pacific patch, Mason set out to determine if the same “smog of plastic” existed in the Great Lakes.

In 2012, while teaching at the State University of New York at Fredonia, she obtained a grant from the Burning River Foundation, a nonprofit arm of Great Lakes Brewing Co., that allowed her to rent a specially designed trawling net and hire two scientists from the 5 Gyres Institute for a research trip aboard the U.S. Brig Niagara.

They took 21 samples - eight each from lakes Huron and Erie, and five from Lake Superior. All contained plastic and most of it was considered microplastic.

The two samples with the most plastic came from Lake Erie between Erie, Pennsylvania, and Buffalo, she said.

“That’s where we specifically identified microbeads as being some of the microplastics that we found,” she said.

Subsequent research by Mason and others determined that there were an estimated 15 billion pieces of plastic floating in the five Great Lakes, with the Lake Ontario containing the largest chunk at 4.5 billion, followed closely by Erie at 4 billion.

The most common type of plastics found in the open waters were polyethylene and polypropylene, she said. Both are polymers that are less dense than water, hence they float.

“Generally speaking, these particles are coming from something that is much bigger,” she said, making it hard to determine their origin, although polyethylene is used in plastics bags and milk containers, while polypropylene is used to make laundry jugs.

A plastic bottle on the beach at Headlands State Park in Lake County. Microplastics are often created when larger products such as bottles and jugs break down into smaller pieces.Jill Barbolotta, Ohio Sea Grant

While Lenhart’s research will focus on the physical removal of nanoplastics from the water supply, other scientists are looking at the potential health effects these particles are having on humans and animals.

Phoebe Stapleton, an assistant professor in the department of toxicology and pharmacology at Rutgers University, led a team that placed extremely small nanoplastics in the lungs of rats and found that the particles migrated to the heart, placenta and fetal tissue. A subsequent report out of Italy found larger plastic particles in human placentas that were analyzed after childbirth, she said.

The concerns are two-fold, Stapleton said, that the physical presence of the plastic in human tissue can create inflammation and an unwanted attack on the foreign substance by white blood cells, and that chemicals in the plastic could leach into the body.

Chris Hine, assistant staff at the Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute, has been studying the effects of a plastic additive called Bisphenol A, or BPA, on mice to get a better read on how it might affect humans. BPA has been removed from a lot of plastics but is still used in some food containers as well as in the paper receipts given out at retail stores.

BPA can mimic the hormone estrogen and cause problems for humans, especially for children going through puberty, he said. Most exposures are through eating or drinking, Hine said, and water from a bottle is of a greater concern than from the tap.

A more serious issue related to microplastics could be the buildup of BPA in aquatic life, including fish, and then humans consuming those fish, he said.

To that end, a research report published in 2020 determined that a chemical preservative in tire fragments found in Pacific Northwest streams were responsible for killing salmon before they can spawn.

“The finding suggests that fish and other creatures elsewhere in the U.S. and around the world are also at risk from the car tire chemical,” states a Guardian article about the fish.

More recently, the Guardian reported that the problem of tire dust in the environment could get worse with electric cars, “due to heavier vehicles and torque.”

Judy Zhang, a civil engineering professor at Case Western Reserve University who has been researching harmful algal blooms in Lake Erie, would also like to study microplastics and how they can attract pesticides and pharmaceuticals also found in the lake.

“If they do co-exist it’s likely they may accumulate on the surface of these microplastics,” Zhang said.

She said a piece of plastic that is broken into pieces has a combined surface area that is much larger than when the item was intact, allowing for much more contact between the plastic and other chemicals.

Ryan Marino, a medical toxicologist at University Hospitals, doesn’t think people should panic over microplastics in their bodies, as their mere presence may not pose a problem, but that it’s something worth paying attention to as various chemicals in plastics can be hazardous.

“That’s something that we need to pay attention to, and people are looking into this,’ he said.

Meanwhile, there are many steps people can take to limit their exposure to microplastics, many of which are found at University Hospitals’ Healthy@UH blog. Some examples include drinking filtered tap water, as bottled water typically has more microplastics in it; microwaving food in glass or ceramic containers rather than plastic containers; and using loose-leaf tea instead of tea bags.

People can also do things to reduce the amount of microplastics getting into the environment.

They can rely more on public transportation, according to the blog, as the wear and tear on your car tires sends plastic particles into the air.

People can also wear more clothing made of natural fibers, such as cotton, wool and hemp, and if they do wear plastic garments wash them less frequently and in cold water, Bartolotta said.

Smokers should never flick their cigarettes out the window as the filters are made of plastic, as are the tips of cigars, Bartolotta said.

She also suggests staying away from single-use disposal plastics.

“We say pick one thing and phase it out of your life completely,” Bartolotta said, such as plastic water bottles or straws.

As for protecting the water supply in Cleveland, it all starts with protecting Lake Erie, Moegling said.

“That’s the most important thing here is to protect that great resource we have,” he said. “All microplastics get into Lake Erie because of humans.”

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