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Jenna Jambeck was enjoying family time on Memorial Day when she received a surprising message.

It was a call from a fisherman who had found something that he thought belonged to her: a plastic bottle. She had rigged it with a tracking device and dropped it into the Mississippi River in St. Louis to learn how trash travels in our waterways. On the bottle was a note with Jambeck’s contact info and a promise of a reward for its safe return if found.

“I get this message saying it’s in west Baton Rouge. I didn’t release any bottles in Baton Rouge,” says Jambeck, Georgia Athletic Association Distinguished Professor in Environmental Engineering and associate director of the university’s New Materials Institute. The institute focuses on sustainable product designs and rethinking how we manage our waste. “I’m thinking to myself, This must be a joke.”

So she asked him to send her a photo of the bottle. It turns out the bottle, referred to as Rogue One by the Star Wars-loving Jambeck, was one dropped upriver 881 miles away near St. Louis.

Jambeck had stuffed the bottle with a GPS tracker that pinged its location regularly for 32 days. After about 30 miles downstream, it got stuck.

When it began moving again, she assumed it had been pushed off a barge. Then it went silent. The battery had died. By the time the fisherman called 11 days later, Jambeck had given up on finding it.

Even to a researcher who specializes in how our misplaced trash can find its way to unlikely places—like the gyres in the middle of the ocean—it was a remarkable reminder of just how far a piece of plastic, used once and then discarded, can go. And it’s a glimpse of the massive challenges posed by the cumulative effects of billions of discarded pieces of plastic.

The Plastic Problem

The Mississippi River is America’s most essential inland waterway. It provides hundreds of billions of gallons of water each day to key industries and drinking water to 20 million people in 50 cities in 10 states. But, like many of the country’s resources, pollution is taking its toll on the storied river.

An internationally renowned waste management expert, Jambeck partnered with the Mississippi River City and Towns Initiative (MRCTI), an initiative by local governments that focuses on economic and environmental security along the river; the United Nations Environment Programme; and the National Geographic Society on enlisting the help of communities and local officials along the river to track upstream and coastal litter using the Marine Debris Tracker app.

The app, which she created with Kyle Johnsen in the College of Engineering, is designed to help everyday people make a difference in the battle against plastic pollution by contributing data on the litter we spot in our communities every day. To date, community members have logged more than 4 million items into Debris Tracker, which is supported through a partnership with Morgan Stanley and the National Geographic Society. More than 70% of that garbage was plastic.

This isn’t surprising.

In 2015, Jambeck led a landmark study, published in Science, estimating that around 8 million metric tons of plastic enter the world’s oceans each year. Her follow-up study two years later revealed 90.5% of plastic is never recycled. Prior to Jambeck’s findings, it was unclear how much plastic was ending up in landfills, let alone spilling into gutters and oceans around the world.

But no one knows just how much pollution is making its way down the Mississippi. So Jambeck and her expedition team, which included her husband and two pre-teen children, set off in a camper to find out.

The Project

By 2018, local leaders along the Mississippi knew the plastic problem was getting out of hand. Mayors along the waterway formed the Mississippi River Plastic Pollution Initiative with the explicit goal of reducing the amount of plastic pollution in and around the river.

“Commitments were made by industry and manufacturers, which is great, but that’s kind of where it stopped because we weren’t really sure how those commitments were going to be implemented,” says Jennifer Wendt, the plastic waste reduction campaign manager for the MRCTI. “We decided what we needed to do was find a baseline of what we have out there—find out what, where, how, and when plastics make their way to the river.”

Enter the Marine Debris Tracker app, the Jambeck team, and thousands of community members.

Over the course of about a month, they would log all the trash they saw all along the river (and then dispose of it properly) to provide a comprehensive overview of how bad the trash problem has become. They’d focus on three pilot cities: Baton Rouge, Louisiana; St. Louis, Missouri; and St. Paul, Minnesota. Jambeck would also release plastic bottles fitted with GPS trackers, like Rogue One, to track how the river carries trash in each city. The three cities also had designated clean up days for residents to help record data and be part of the solution to the problem.

The Findings

The project logged more than 75,000 pieces of trash throughout the Mississippi River Basin. Over 90% of what community scientists found were logged within about 30 miles of the river’s banks. And most of that trash was plastic.

“It’s easy to think when you’re logging items in the Marine Debris Tracker, ‘I’m just logging all of these little pieces of litter on the ground I see’—but what’s the bigger picture?” says Sheridan Finder, a master’s student in environmental engineering who is centering her thesis on the Mississippi River project.

Local mayors have already committed to reducing plastic pollution in the river by 20%. Thanks to this project, they now have their baseline to measure if their new policies work.

“The bottom line is we hope that the data can be used by the communities for action,” Jambeck says. “So now the mayors and community leaders can decide what they want to do to reduce plastic.”

“We do not often consider how things we do every day, such as washing your clothes, can contribute to environmental problems in our nearby rivers and streams,” says Krista Capps, a freshwater ecologist and an assistant professor in the Odum School of Ecology and the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. “Synthetic fabric, such as fleece, can break down in the washing machine and generate microplastics. Those plastics travel to wastewater treatment plants.”

Wastewater treatment can filter out some of the microplastics, but they’re not set up to grab them all. And that treated wastewater can still be full of microplastics when it’s eventually released into nearby streams and rivers to travel downstream—where another community depends on the waterway for drinking water.

Scientists are still studying the health risks posed by microplastics. But recent studies have shown chemicals from plastics present in human organs and tissues, including known carcinogens.

“Through my research and teaching, I hope to support people in understanding that we all live in a watershed and that we are part of the local and global water cycle,” Capps says. “Whatever we do upstream in smaller streams and rivers will have downstream effects on other communities of people and ecosystems. One of the wonderful things about working at the University of Georgia is that teams of researchers from many disciplines are working with diverse groups of stakeholders to address challenges facing our freshwater resources. I think that is how we will solve these kinds of wicked environmental problems in Georgia and throughout the world.”

Can I Recycle This?

Katherine Shayne stood near the water for the launch of the project in Baton Rouge.

An instructor in the College of Engineering and a 2019 UGA 40 Under 40 honoree, Shayne has been at Jambeck’s side for years—first as an undergraduate, then as a master’s student, and now as a partner in an organization she and Jambeck co-founded to combat waste.

“We had a passion for reducing the amount of plastic that ends up in the environment, but we also saw a need to help cities,” Shayne says. “Some cities have over 100,000 people in them and only one or two working on recycling operations and education.”

With many cities still relying on print media, such as billboards or flyers in mailboxes, to spread the word about what they do and do not recycle, Shayne and Jambeck saw a need to fill the education gap about what is recyclable and how to make sure your item doesn’t end up in the trash instead.

“We wanted something that people could ask about recycling and find out the answer immediately,” Shayne says. “And then they could recycle their item properly and feel good about doing it.”

So that’s what they built.

The Can I Recycle This? website provides localized answers to specific recycling questions, creating a virtual platform that helps consumers navigate the confusing world of recycling.

Shayne is now adapting the site and smart technology-compatible program into an app that will work with companies like Amazon to provide a list of the recyclable packing material in deliveries according to local ordinances.

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