Å·ÃÀAƬ

New plastic arrives at Hawai'i's beaches and oceans everyday! While the world is finally recognizing the magnitude of the problem, we still don't know the whole story of what happens to plastics once they are in our oceans and their effects on both marine and human life.

That is where the Center for Marine Debris Research (CMDR) comes in. CMDR research concentrates on three areas:

• The physical journey these plastics are taking once into our oceans.
• The chemical effects plastics have on the ocean environments as the plastics slowly degrade.
• The biological impacts on ocean life ingesting plastics and how those effects vary across locations and species.

Understanding plastics in the complex marine environment is vital to identifying the wide array of problems they are causing and deciding how to best solve those problems.