Metropolis of Santa Barbara Awarded $1.26M to Analysis Microplastic Air pollution Prevention
Microplastics are tiny, often unobtrusive pieces of plastic that are ubiquitous — they’re in our streets, in the air we breathe, in our streams and oceans, in the food we eat and in the water we drink.
They’re smaller than a pencil eraser, but harmful enough that organizations spend millions of dollars trying to stop their spread.
Last week, the City of Santa Barbara Department of Sustainability and Resilience announced that $1.26 million was awarded to the City of Creek Department in partnership with the University of Southern California Sea Grant Program to conduct research into pollution from fund microplastics.
“The Creeks Division’s research to reduce the amount of microplastics reaching our streams and oceans complements the city’s ongoing efforts to reduce the impact of single-use plastics in Santa Barbara,” said Alelia Parenteau, director of sustainability and resilience.
According to Kacey Drescher, the city’s communications specialist, microplastics “can absorb and transport pollutants, leach harmful chemicals into the water and are often mistaken for food by wildlife.” They are often the product of larger plastic products that have been broken down into smaller and smaller pieces by the sun, wind and waves.
Fieldwork will take place in the city of Santa Barbara, as well as in San Francisco and Los Angeles, to measure the impact of street sweepers and trash collectors on microplastic debris in stormwater runoff, which carries the majority of microplastic pollution into the ocean.
The Clean Streets, Clean Seas: Innovating Public Works to Intercept Microplastics in Urban Runoff project will provide the first measured and reported results on the potential impact of urban street cleaning on microplastic pollution reduction.
“This project will determine how microplastics can be removed from sealed urban surfaces as quickly as possible, and from as many acres as possible, as far as possible to protect our streams, estuaries and oceans from harmful pollution,” said Jill Murray, water quality research analyst of the Creeks Division.
The work is being conducted in collaboration with the City of Santa Barbara, the University of California Santa Barbara, the San Francisco Estuary Institute, the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, the Moore Institute for Plastic Pollution Research, WSP USA and Cascade Water Resources.
The $1.26 million is part of a larger $27 million funding effort from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to address the prevention and removal of debris in marine environments and around the Great Lakes nationwide.
Clean Streets, Clean Seas is one of 29 projects selected in the competition through two opportunities supported by the bipartisan Infrastructure Act and utilizing funds from the Inflation Reduction Act: The Marine Debris Challenge Competition and the Marine Debris Community Action Coalitions.
The Department of Sustainability and Resilience will present the item to City Council for acceptance of grant funding in August.
