We recently met up with pELAstic team members for our annual workshop – we had a huge turnout with around 30 people (a mix of online and in-person) from across North America! This year we met up in Toronto, home of the Rochman Lab at the U of T. Researchers shared their progress and preliminary findings from the various limnocorral experiments and the whole-lake experiment, which prompted many interesting discussions about microplastics and the complex ways in which they interact, impact, and are distributed in freshwater environments.
As part of the workshop, we got a chance to tour the Rochman Lab and learn about how microplastic samples are processed, from the extraction phase to visual counting/sorting, and chemical ID and spectroscopy. Microplastic quantification and polymer ID is a tedious but extremely important job!
And the workshop wouldn’t be complete without some team bonding – and what better way to get to know your team better than to bowl with them!
The pELAstic Project 