Micro plastics are everywhere. Tiny particles that break up from all kinds of unnatural products from polyester shirts and spandex to nylon gillnets and floating buoys out in the ocean.

But not all plastics are the same. Along the B.C. coast, near Prince Rupert, the North Coast Ecology Centre Society has embarked on a two-year study to determine how micro plastics maybe impacting the sensitive North Coast ecology and marine life. So far, through a four-month pilot project and now a full year into the two-year study, preliminary accounts suggest micro plastics and other larger marine debris is all over the northern coast of B.C. Locating micro plastics is the easy part, finding out where it came from and how to limit it, is much more difficult.

Colin Masson is a Board Member with the North Coast Ecology Centre Society and has spent decades on B.C.’s coast. I caught up with him on his sail boat in the Prince Rupert harbour to hear about why the ecology society wanted to undertake the micro plastics study.