“Will and I were growing increasingly concerned about plastic in the environment and so were our colleagues,” said Somarelli, who has worked as a team leader on the Bass Connections project —”Bioremediation of Plastic Pollution to Conserve Biodiversity”— for more than five years now. Over the years, the group has worked to both uncover the health consequences associated with plastic additives and discover faster ways to degrade plastics using bacteria. The bioinformatics team also works to uncover which plastic additives — materials added to plastics to improve performance —might be harmful to human health.