Northeastern’s new Plastics Center will unite science, policy and industry to generate real-world solutions to the plastics problem.
Maria Ivanova and Aron Stubbins will co-direct the new Plastics Center at Northeastern University, a hub dedicated to exploring the complex challenges surrounding plastics use, waste and regulation.
Ivanova, director of the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, says the center’s mission is threefold. First, to bring together Northeastern researchers working on plastics. Second, to expand the knowledge about plastics and public policy at every stage of their life cycle.
“And number three is to actually make a difference in the negotiations in the policy process,” she says.
The center’s broad goal is to understand the so-called plastics dilemma, says Stubbins, professor of marine and environmental sciences, chemistry and chemical biology and civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern.
Originally invented to replace natural ivory, plastics not only helped elephant conservation but also lowered the cost of many goods. They continue to offer significant benefits: plastic packaging makes food last longer, Stubbins says; polymer varnishes make wood more durable; and lighter plastic parts make airplanes much lighter, reducing fuel consumption.
“What would hospitals look like without gloves, syringes, tubing?” Stubbins says. “It’s just almost unimaginable.”
But plastics also come with serious downsides, Stubbins says, such as growing long-lasting waste and the potential leaching of toxins into food and water that harm both humans and the environment.
“The broad issue is to understand that balance [between the good and the bad] and try to use plastics in ways that minimize the human health and the environmental impacts,” Stubbins says.
While plastics have been detected in human brains, lungs and digestive systems — even in babies — there is still a lack of data on what harm they cause, he says, and how to mitigate it.
He emphasizes the need for systemic change to improve plastics safety and reduce carbon dioxide emissions associated with plastics.
“A lot of the time, we don’t have the choice to use plastics that are safer because the market supplies us with toxic things and we don’t have a choice to buy non-toxic things,” Stubbins says. “We need the policy to put that into place … to create societal pressure [on manufacturers].”
By identifying toxic additives and promoting safer alternatives, both scientific knowledge and regulations can lead to meaningful change.
Several years ago, Stubbins began conversations with his Northeastern colleagues — including chemists, material engineers and human health experts — to see who was focusing their research on different aspects of plastics. They held a series of workshops discussing possible collaborations.
When Ivanova joined Northeastern in 2022 and Stubbins completed an interdisciplinary sabbatical at the School of Public Policy, both saw the need to integrate science, policy and public engagement.
“Because both of us are interested in plastics and our participation in the U.N. plastics negotiations in Busan, South Korea, we decided that this work has to continue,” Ivanova says. “The center will be not just interdisciplinary, but truly transdisciplinary and cross-college.”
Currently, the center operates as an organic network of different projects led by about a dozen Northeastern faculty members from various fields.
“We seek to identify the interests of the faculty and what they see as the most important,” Stubbins says. “Where they see their own skills and where they have needs for other skills to do the work they want to do.”
The center also welcomes inputs from the industry, organizations that represent plastics manufacturers and industries that use plastics, he says, and will have policy experts and artists involved in projects.
“That’s also part of the solution — to try and figure out through conversation how best to make plastics and use plastics?” Stubbins says. “If that’s just changing the formula for some plastics or reducing use in other cases, those are all incremental gains that can be made within our purview.”
Stubbins’ own research, funded by the National Science Foundation, focuses on improving analytical methods used to detect and measure nano- and microplastics in the environment, particularly in the ocean. His team uses radiocarbon analysis to determine whether particles in the samples originated from organic materials or fossil fuels. Their findings suggest that 5% to 20% of the total carbon-containing compounds on the ocean’s surface, previously thought to come from living organisms, are actually plastics.
The team is also advancing techniques like pyrolysis gas chromatography–mass spectrometry, a method capable of identifying plastic particles too small to be seen. Sampling and filtering thousands of litres of ocean water helps researchers improve this method so it can better detect plastics in much smaller quantities like human blood samples.
Stubbins is also investigating how plastics may disrupt the ocean’s biological carbon pump — a key process by which the ocean absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide. Normally, phytoplankton take in carbon dioxide, grow, die and sink to the deep ocean as marine snow, locking carbon away for centuries. His team hypothesizes that plastic particles interfere with this process, first, by slowing the descent of marine snow due to their buoyancy and by releasing carbon compounds that lack essential nutrients, weakening the growth of phytoplankton and reducing the ocean’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide.
Ivanova has recently co-authored an article analyzing why international plastics agreement negotiations have stalled and proposing legal strategies that could move them forward.
The formal launch of the Plastics Center will be celebrated in September during Climate Week.