A new technology using bubbles to clean up plastic pollution in waterways could be making its United States debut in Lansing.
Researchers at Grand Valley State University and Michigan State University are collaborating to find out if a “bubble barrier” would effectively collect trash in the Grand River.
A bubble barrier is a perforated rubber tube placed diagonally across the bottom of a waterway. A compressor pumps air through the tube, creating a curtain of bubbles with an upward current that pushes garbage to the surface. Once it’s at the surface, the flow of the water directs trash into a catchment system.
There’s currently three bubble barriers installed in the Netherlands and one in Portugal, and more projects are planned throughout Europe—and now Lansing. The first was installed in 2019 in Amsterdam.
According to The Great Bubble Barrier, the company that developed the technology, these systems “have a catch rate of 86% of the floating plastic pollution in a waterway” and can capture plastics as small as one millimeter to as large as one meter.
The bubble barrier in Amsterdam catches nearly 180 pounds of trash every month, the website said.
That includes some microplastics, which range from five millimeters—about the size of a pencil eraser—to one nanometer, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. A nanometer is smaller than a strand of DNA.
If installed, MSU researchers would remove plastic and other trash from the catchment location and study it.
“The thing with microplastics, especially in the water, is that just a lot around it isn't known, like the size of the plastic, its makeup, the polymer type, even where it's coming from,” researcher Ellie Sibula said. “It's assumed it's a lot of food packaging, but we don't actually know.”
Sibula is a technical aide for the MSU Water Alliance, which is one of the research groups finding out if a bubble barrier would work in the Grand River.
They’ve begun tracking how the Grand River’s seasonal patterns will affect the bubble barrier like how flow rates and water levels change each season and year-to-year variability like droughts.
“If we want this project to be long lasting, and the barrier itself like to be able to work under all these different instances, we need to make sure we're characterizing those well so we can anticipate, like, if a drought happens, it's still able to collect everything. If the water level is higher, it's still able to collect,” Sibula said.
The group has also begun characterizing plastic they suspect the barrier will collect. In the fall, they went out with volunteers to clean up the Grand River and brought some of that trash back to the lab for analysis.
Sibula said there’s been talk of the barrier installation happening this summer, but that timeline isn’t definite. It depends on what they find in the preliminary studies, if grant applications need to be changed and how much money is available.
“This is all to preemptively begin understanding the potential effectiveness of the bubble barrier so we're not wasting money in installing it,” Sibula said.
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Grand Valley’s Annis Water Resources Institute is studying how the project could affect the Grand River’s ecology.
They’re doing this by analyzing the water quality, health of little plants and animals called phytoplankton and zooplankton and sediment chemistry at the bottom of the river, said Al Steinman.
Steinman is currently a research professor at the institute but was the director for more than two decades.
“It's possible – we don't know for sure – that as the agitation from the bubbles comes, the sediment will get stirred up,” Steinman said. “Given where it is in Lansing and the Grand River, it's possible there might be some legacy metals and heavy metals and some other nasty stuff in the sediment.”
Residents don’t need to worry about direct health effects from this potential sediment stirring, he said. Toxins wouldn’t get into drinking water.
But it means existing toxins could impact more fish than it already does.
Steinman said a lot of the Grand River’s fish are bottom feeders, so they’re eating the microplastics and heavy metals that could be in the sediment anyways. But if the Bubble Barrier pushes these pollutants up into the water, fish that aren’t bottom feeders might be attracted to the particles and eat them.
That means they’ll be full on microplastics, not nutritious food, so they’ll starve to death.
When bugs, bottom feeders and other fish eat pollutants, contaminants are exposed to the rest of the food chain and eventually people – a process called bioaccumulation.
Steinman said the solution to plastic pollution is regulating at the manufacturing level. Cleaning up plastics already in the environment is treating the symptom, not disease, he said.
However, Steinman said taking microplastics out of the Grand River will have benefits for the local area. It’ll make the system cleaner and take out some of those pollutants that could bioaccumulate.
And the bubble barrier could raise awareness around plastic pollution in the community.
“Because it's being placed in a heavy use area, there's tremendous educational opportunity around this,” Steinman said.
Others at MSU and GVSU will be conducting citizen surveys to find out how people feel about the project and encourage public engagement. They’re even teaming up with an artist, Avery Williamson, to create art installations around the potential barrier to teach residents about local water issues.
Steinman compared this to BeBot, robots the institute uses to pick up trash along the Great Lakes beaches.
“The real value of this BeBot is not necessarily how much waste it picks up, because there are other opportunities to pick this stuff up,” Steinman said. “But when a child sees this robot going along the beach that somebody's controlling with a joystick, you can't believe how enthusiastic they become. Their parent follows them, and then we have an opportunity to tell them why it's there, what we're doing and how important microplastics and plastics are in the Great Lakes.”
