Marine research/activist Marcus Eriksen has sailed over 35,000 miles in all five oceans, exploring the impacts of plastic waste on aquatic ecosystems. While the work of Marcus and his partners at the 5 Gyres Institute has raised awareness about the ills of our single-use ‘throwaway culture,’ plastic debris in the ocean is generally too broken down to identify a source (i.e. what’s the source? and who threw it away?). Chartering a ship to collect data across North America’s Great Lakes, Marcus and his colleague Dr. Sam Mason, a chemist at S.U.N.Y. Fredonia, set out on their first landlocked research mission, hoping to trace plastic waste to its source. In all five of the Great Lakes, Marcus and Dr. Mason found thousands of micro plastic beads in all of their samples. In the lab, they linked these micro plastic beads to the exfoliates in over-the-counter facial-scrub products. Oceanographer Sylvia Earle began her studies of the Earth’s seas in the late 1950s. Over the past half-century, she has witnessed bountiful, pristine waters become overrun by single-use plastic waste. In making his plastics research more accessible to general audiences, Marcus makes a bust of Sylvia’s face out of PET (polyethylene terephthalate) - the very plastic that Sylvia has seen sink and clutter the ocean floor. The Sylvia mask is the most recent piece in an exhibition of the masks highlighting the efforts of plastics researchers around the world.