mr. alspach, what about you? mr. alspach: thank you. i appreciate the information about judo and i will take any , available opportunity to visit juneau anytime i can reasonably do so. sen. sullivan: beautiful place. i just spent the last three days there and it is wonderful and they are very excited about this new foundation. we have a huge noaa research facility. we have the university of alaska fairbanks which has the college of fisheries and oceans, university of alaska southeast. it's kind of becoming a big research hub on fisheries, on oceans, and this will add to that. which will now be on ocean debris. you guys are all invited. in fact, everybody here is invited. come on up to alaska. we would love to have you. mr. alspach: a couple points. first, with respect to biodegradation other water bottle, i believe technology can to do that probably already exists in a number of facets but the problem is not the technology, is the scalability of that technology for industrial processes that make it economical. i believe the private sect

mr. alspach: yeah, that's also an excellent question. and i guess i would give some credit to the state of california, which i believe is doing a very good job of approaching this topic. i believe when the state passed its bill to give the regulators a mandate to look at this process, they didn't go in with a foregone conclusion that something should be done about microplastics. but with an open mind that it's an important question that needs to be addressed. and so, with that in mind, they went and developed a definition of microplastics, followed by methods which again, which have their own shortcomings, but nevertheless, are standardized to the best of our ability at this point in time. and once those methods in place, they're going to look at source waters to try to understand the occurrence. and with that hopefully more health effects studies will be done in parallel. and then ultimately, when their monitoring program has run its course, 2e 2ope 2here 2ill 2e enough information between the occurrence data, the treat ability data, an

mr. alspach, you mentioned developing systems for measuring the amount of micro nanoplastics. and that seems critical to our understanding here of how particles are shed and how much gets into us, dr. brander and dr. mason are, is it just in the last couple of years where we've really had the tools to start to understand this shedding process and the amount that's getting into our human bodies? >> i really think that it is just over the past couple of years that we've started to better understand human exposure and human occurrence. and in part, that's because the technologies to measure nanoplastics are slowly coming online, things like pyrolysis gcms, which is a fancy way of saying you're pyrolizing a sample and measuring the mass of particles that might be in there. so yes, it is, it is a new area of study. and i think we're also just starting to understand how easily those particles can trans locate and move within within our bodies as well. >> should we quit putting plastic pacifiers in our babie'' mouths? >> probably yes. >> ok. on that, senator sullivan has worked reall