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To Michelle Nowlin, plastic debris is more than just an eyesore. It represents potential harm to human health, aquatic and marine life, and the ecosystem for generations to come.

Cheap and easy to produce, plastic in its many forms is a ubiquitous component of the products we use every day, from clothing, tires, and cell phones to the industrial machinery used to make them and packaging they come in. But plastic — and the perennial problem of plastic waste — is now at the forefront of public health concerns with the emergence of new research on microplastics and nanoplastics in the environment that are being inhaled and ingested by humans and animals.

These tiny particles of plastic are now being discovered in human brains, lungs, arteries, placentas, and even breast milk, raising concerns about the long-term health effects of both the materials and their toxic additives, such as Bisphenol A and phthalates.

“Plastic is not a natural substance in the human body, yet it has penetrated every single aspect of our lives from conception to death and it's going to have a cumulative effect over time,” said Nowlin, clinical professor and co-director of Duke Law’s Environmental Law and Policy Clinic.

“We need a lot more information about the human health impacts of exposure to those plastics, but scientists are starting to see that whether it's the chemical additives, or whether it's the irritant of the microplastic itself, there is a biological response, and it does have a negative impact on aspects of our health that is going to continue to get worse unless we turn off the tap.”

Microplastics are particles no longer than a pencil-top eraser, while nanoplastics measuring less 1/25,000 of an inch can be virtually invisible. They appear as manufactured products — synthetic fibers in textiles and microbeads in cosmetics, for example — or result from the breakdown of larger plastic items. 

An estimated 20 million tons of plastic waste enters the environment each year, with about 9 million tons entering oceans. The U.S. plays a big role, generating more plastic waste than any other country, according to a 2022 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

“It's a global problem that many countries are really drowning in, and a lot of it is our waste,” said Margaret Spring JD ’91, chief conservation and science officer for the Monterey Bay Aquarium, who chaired the committee that wrote the report and has represented the International Science Council in negotiations for a Global Plastic Treaty to end plastic pollution.

“It took us 50 years to get to this point, and we’re not going to fix it overnight, so we're going to have to change the way we think about this. It’s a systemic problem that needs to be attacked at all levels, and there’s a role for everybody.”

Reducing waste at the source

Under the leadership of Nowlin, clinic co-director Ryke Longest, and lecturing fellow and staff scientist Dr. Nancy Lauer, the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic has focused much of its work for the past seven years on plastic pollution, identifying interventions and policy solutions for different points in the plastics lifecycle — from production to use to disposal — to eliminate, reduce, or mitigate the harms of plastics.

The work began when a client in coastal North Carolina sought help to enforce the removal of abandoned fishing gear. Sea turtles, sea birds, and marine mammals were becoming entangled in the gear, some made of plastics, and ingesting monofilament fishing lines and other items like single-use shopping bags that make their way to the ocean.

Public awareness of plastics in fish and seafood was also impacting North Carolina's fishing industry.

“They had done necropsies of dead turtles, cut open the gut, and found that the animals were dying of malnutrition because their bodies were choked with plastics,” Nowlin said.

“The more research we did, the more we understood how plastic debris was interfering with ecological processes and affecting overall fitness at every level, from big whales down to zooplankton that are the nutritional building blocks of marine life.”

Clinic members discovered that a lot of plastic waste originates in urban storm drain systems that feed trash and road debris such as tire particles into inland waterways leading to the ocean. Runoff and river transport have been identified as a major cause of plastic pollution in waters from the coasts to remote inland areas; high levels of microplastics have been found in sand samples from Great Lakes beaches.

“We started thinking, if that's the mechanism, what's the legal remedy?” Nowlin said. “We know that stormwater outfalls are regulated under the Clean Water Act, so could trash and plastic litter fall within the requirements to screen out or regulate under the Clean Water Act? And we learned through research and analysis that indeed it could be.”

In one of its earliest projects, the clinic worked with a client to create and advocate for a framework to collect data on the types and quantities of plastic items being discarded, develop policies to reduce waste at the source, and capture waste escaping into urban waterways.

The clinic continues that work with the Haw River Assembly, an environmental advocacy and action group, to control plastic waste and other litter by installing stormwater trash traps in waterways throughout the Haw River Watershed. Data from debris cleanouts are collected in an online dashboard and used to inform advocacy and policy interventions at the state level, and a waste collection and categorization protocol developed by Lauer is being used across the state.

Research on the health impacts of ingesting plastic and chemical additives, often through leaching from food packaging, has led to interdisciplinary collaboration, through the Duke Plastic Pollution Working Group, with the Nicholas School of the Environment and the School of Medicine to develop policies and regulatory mechanisms to reduce plastic debris and its impacts on human and animal health.

Other clients include Don't Waste Durham, a local nonprofit that advocates for sustainability through waste reduction and reuse projects, and Oceana, an international organization that works to pass new local, state, and national initiatives to replace single-use plastics with refill and re-use systems, including in North Carolina state parks.

Addressing environmental inequities

As with all its work, the clinic focuses on the environmental justice ramifications, including disparate health and quality of life impacts on communities where plastic manufacturing and disposal facilities are located, including Snow Hill, a predominantly Black community in Sampson County where a nearly 1,200-acre landfill is located and where Durham — and Duke University — send all their solid waste.

“One of the reasons this work is so important is it hits on multiple levels of governance,” Longest said. “The work that we're doing in Durham on the microplastics issue is illustrative, but it also feeds into a globally significant problem.

"We’re really on the cutting edge, meaning what Michelle Nowlin and Nancy Lauer are doing is really setting the standard in national discourse. It also shows what happens when we take a deep dive on a subject for an extended period of time. We’re having an impact.”

Over the course of the clinic’s work on plastics, 40 to 50 students have been educated on the issues, Longest said. Many are now working in the field on local initiatives up to international treaty negotiations.

“The most valuable thing I learned through the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic, and Duke more broadly, was the ability to learn a new space and solve problems,” said Dacie Thompson Meng JD/MEM ’16, who began her career at environmental law firm Beveridge & Diamond and is now policy director for North America at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation.

“I helped to build up the plastics practice at my firm when no one had plastics practices yet. As these laws started coming online, we had to figure out, ‘What does that mean for our clients? What does that look like for regulators? How does this all work?’ That ability to tackle a new problem head-on is certainly something that I took away from the clinic.”