"I am convinced that, sadly, the fiberglass is a very powerful contaminant, and it has this deadly impact on shellfish."Corina Ciocan, University of Brighton
Glass-reinforced plastic, or GRP, is a composite material used in millions of recreational boats around the world. The problem is, there's no way to recycle it.
A new study in the Journal of Hazardous Materials found that shellfish are ingesting large amounts of fiberglass, predominantly coming from these GRP boats.
CAI's Gilda Geist spoke to the lead investigator on this study, ecotoxicologist Corina Ciocan, of the University of Brighton, to learn more about what the results of her study mean for shellfish populations.
Gilda Geist Corina, it looks like the shellfish you studied came from an area in front of a boatyard in South England's Chichester Harbor. What made you choose that location?
Corina Ciocan Chichester Harbor is a natural harbor in southeast England. You have a lot of areas of scientific interest, but at the same time it's a very commercial harbor with a huge number of vessels.
About six, seven years ago, I was approached by the harbormaster, who was a little bit worried about the plastic pollution in the harbor. I had a whole summer in 2018 when, together with my team, we just went out on the water with the boats. We collected those oysters and mussels from in front of an active boatyard. We realized that especially the winter samples were absolutely full of fiberglass, and that coincided with the time when the boatyard was very active. So we assumed that a lot of waste coming from those boat yards would have been blown over the water and then down in the sediment. And so the oysters were exposed to those huge, huge quantities of fiberglass that we actually found in the flesh.
GG How much fiberglass is in these shellfish?
CC Somewhere up to 12,000 pieces per kilogram of oyster, which is huge. It's absolutely mind blowing.
GG And so to clarify, glass reinforced plastic—is that the same thing as fiberglass?
CC No. You have this fiberglass component that runs in the middle and it's sandwiched in between two plastics. And that will be glass reinforced plastic. Microplastic is so light and will float on top of the water. And then you will have the fiberglass that is heavier than the water, and that will drop down on the sediment, and it will be accessible for any organisms that are residing down in the sediment. GRP was first created about 100 years ago, so for sure the glass fibers have been present in the environment for a long, long time.
GG I wonder if you have a sense of how many boats in general are made with these glass reinforced plastic particles?
CC In the US, there are about 12 million recreational boats. Most of them are GRP boats. You probably have about a million boats that are going to become obsolete every single year. There is no recycling solution for GRP, so most of those boats are going to be either abandoned, crushed or taken to the landfill. There are going to be a lot of microplastics and a lot of fiberglass that are coming from the GRP boats.
GG If you had any advice to boaters who want to make less of a negative environmental impact, what would it be?
CC There has to be a very big voice from the boating community to do research into recycling. Because, as I said, at the moment, this material is not recyclable. If you go to a little bit more obscure parts of the estuaries or coastlines, they're full of abandoned boats because there is no solution. So it has to be the voice of the community to push the governments and to push the boating industry—which is a very, very powerful industry and a very rich industry—to support research into recycling.
GG As an ecotoxicologist, do you eat shellfish?
CC I do actually, and I love my mussels.
I am convinced that, sadly, the fiberglass is a very powerful contaminant, and it has this deadly impact on shellfish. Those fiberglass, they get into the organism, and the organism is not able to excrete them. Then the assumption is that, yes, that organism is going to die at some point. This might be a blessing in disguise, if you want, because that lowers the probability for human ingestion.
I don't think it will have such a huge impact on human health, but we need to be worried about the environment and about all the organisms that, one way or another, contribute to maintaining this wonderful coastline.
