I am a Senior Research Scientist for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute and this is one of several pieces made for a project called Wool and Water.

Wool and Water is a data art project that blends fiber art with scientific data to create visual representations of changing water quality conditions in the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain Basin. In association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute has embarked on a collaborative fiber arts project supported by the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond.

Microplastics are small pieces of plastic < 5mm in diameter and arise from a variety of sources including fibers from synthetic clothing and eroded fragments of material from litter and other sources. These materials often pass through municipal wastewater treatment facilities and can be ingested by fish and other wildlife and cause digestive blockage and altered feeding behavior. Microplastics can also accumulate harmful chemicals such as heavy metals and manmade industrial compounds called polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), which have a variety of human health effects.

This piece is meant to create awareness of the pervasive nature of microplastics in our environment. It is a plain stockinette stitch rectangle on which Plastics is spelled out in a retro font in plastic beads. The font represents the 1950s, when mass production of plastics increased dramatically in the US. The total number of knitted stitches in this piece is 10,440. This total is representative of the number of microplastic particles (10,000 – 15,000) found by researchers at SUNY Plattsburgh to be discharged into Lake Champlain at monitored wastewater treatment facilities every day.

Data: Lake Champlain Basin Program State of the Lake Report 2021 https://www.lcbp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/SOL2021_f... and LeTarte et al. 2019 Survey of Microplastic Pollution from Wastewater Treatment Plant Effluent within the Lake Champlain Basin https://dspace.sunyconnect.suny.edu/handle/1951/70659.