Collaboration helping save planet from plastic pollution  

Micro-plastics, smaller than a pen-tip, have been found in small aquatic organisms and throughout the food chain. (Patricia Corcoran, Submitted photo) - Professor Patricia Corcoran's interdisciplinary team catalogued plastic and microplastic pollution, including tiny plastic pellets of various colours, shapes, sizes and origins, found along Great Lakes shorelines. (Patricia Corcoran, submitted photo) - When she was a kid, Patricia Corcoran would examine interesting little stones that lined the gravel road near her home. "I always wanted to become a geologist," she recalled. These days, the Western professor of sedimentary petrology is focused less on pebbles and more on plastics. But she was dismayed to discover these two materials are often fused together into technofossils, a rock-hard legacy of profligate consumerism. As a leading expert on microplastics pollution research, Corcoran has influenced disparate worlds of science and art with her discovery and depictions of human-caused pollution. Corcoran gave a public lecture this week, as recipient of the Fallona Family Interdisciplinary Science Award, about her team approach to plastic pollution research.