A new Chicago Tribune investigation published May 31 takes a hard look at how plastic pellets and microplastics are piling up across the Great Lakes, and a good deal of the reporting lands close to home. The piece features Dr. Sherri Mason, the microplastics researcher who keynoted our Spring Confluence at Geneva College just days earlier, and it follows the plastic supply chain straight through western Pennsylvania and the Ohio River Valley.
Inside the Tribune report
- Nurdles, the rice-sized plastic pellets used to manufacture new products, are escaping into the Great Lakes from the plants that make them, the trains and trucks that haul them, and the factories that mold them into goods, according to the Tribune.
- After reviewing thousands of government, scientific, and industry records, the paper reported that major oil and chemical companies have downplayed the health risks of plastics and oversold how much can realistically be recycled.
- The U.S. plastics recycling rate has hovered around 5 percent in recent years, far below the targets the industry promised decades ago, the investigation found.
- Microplastics now turn up in tap water, bottled water, beer, and Great Lakes fish, and a growing body of research links exposure to a range of health problems.
The western PA connection
Much of this story runs through our own backyard. The Tribune reports that Shell’s petrochemical plant in Beaver County, which opened in 2022, can produce 1.6 million tons of plastic pellets a year, and that those nurdles travel north to Erie and out to other manufacturing hubs around the Great Lakes. Shipments from the Ohio River Valley feed the same network.
Lake Erie sits at the receiving end as one of the most plastic-burdened of the Great Lakes. The report notes that when Mason returned in 2024 to sample the same Erie sites she had studied a decade earlier, she found microfiber concentrations dramatically higher than before. Standing over pellets scattered along a rail siding, she described them to the Tribune as looking “like stars in the night sky,” beautiful until you understand what they are.
For the communities of the Upper Ohio River Basin, it is a reminder that what moves through our valley does not stay in our valley. The same waterways that carry our headwaters down to the Ohio also carry plastic downstream and into the lakes that supply drinking water to tens of millions of people.
Read the full investigation
This is reporting from the Chicago Tribune, and the full investigation goes well beyond what we have summarized here, including the industry’s recycling claims, the regulatory fights playing out in the U.S. and Canada, and Mason’s own experience navigating plastic industry pressure. Read it in full at the Tribune:
Dr. Mason’s Confluence keynote and this reporting point to the same takeaway. Microplastics are now a permanent part of the water story across our region, and keeping watch on them is part of protecting the waters that connect Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia.
