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In the past two decades, the world’s ten worst floods have done more than a hundred and sixty-five billion dollars’ worth of damage and driven more than a billion people from their homes. In the summer of 2017 alone, Hurricane Harvey dumped more than fifty inches of rain over Texas, a monster monsoon season damaged more than eight hundred thousand homes in India, and flash floods and mudslides claimed at least five hundred lives in Sierra Leone.

Professor Mark Servos, Canada Research Chair in Water Quality Protection and professor of Biology, Nandita Basu, professor in the Departments of Earth and Environmental Sciences and Civil and Environmental Engineering, and post-doctoral fellow, Kim Van Meter, were prominently featured in Kitchener-Waterloo’s local newspaper.

The presence and accumulation of plastic debris in the marine environment has seen a substantial increase, with global production of plastics having grown exponentially in the last 60 years, from 1.5 million tons of plastics around 1950 to more than 300 million tons annually in 2014. In 2010 alone, estimates show that between 4.8 and 12.7 million tons of plastic litter entered the marine environment (UNEP and GRID-Arendal, 2016. Marine Litter Vital Graphics. United Nations Environment Programme, Nairobi, Kenya).