Voices from the Field | Microplastics in Aquatic Environments

What happens to a plastic bottle after you throw it away?

That was the question quietly sitting in my mind during this month’s School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability (SEES) Seminar led by Dr. Bao-Son Trinh, a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Northern Illinois University and researcher at the Ho Chi Minh City Institute for Development Studies.

 Explore his work: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=rK9R-XEAAAAJ&hl=en

At first, the answer feels simple: it gets collected, maybe recycled, maybe sent to a landfill.

But from the field perspective, the story doesn’t end there, it begins there.

Dr. Bao-Son Trinh walked us through what actually happens next. In many places around the world, especially in rapidly growing urban areas, a significant portion of plastic waste is not properly managed. Instead, it finds its way into nearby drains, rivers, and eventually the ocean .

Now imagine that same plastic bottle, months or years later.

It doesn’t disappear.

It breaks down slowly into smaller and smaller pieces. Until one day, it becomes something almost invisible: microplastics.

And here’s where the story gets personal.

These tiny particles don’t just float around harmlessly. In the rivers Dr. Trinh studied in Vietnam, microplastics were found everywhere water, sediment, and even inside living organisms.

Small aquatic organisms mistake them for food. Fish eat those organisms. Larger fish eat smaller fish.

And step by step, particle by particle, microplastics move up the food chain.

Eventually, the question becomes uncomfortable: Where do they end up?

Research suggests they may end up with us.

What made this seminar powerful wasn’t just the science, it was the field reality behind it. Sampling across river systems, collecting water, sediment, and organisms, and identifying plastic particles under microscopes, this is what it takes to truly understand the scale of the problem.

And what the field is telling us is clear: Microplastics are no longer a distant environmental issue, they are part of our everyday ecosystem.

Voices from the Field Reflection What stayed with me most is this: the microplastics problem is not just about waste, it’s about systems.

How we produce. How we consume. How we manage what we throw away.

Because every piece of plastic has a journey.

The real question is, where does it end?