Plastic: one of humanity’s most beloved inventions: we ride on it in our cars and our buses, we rely on it to keep our food fresh, and we save people using plastic safety gear and medical tools. The list goes on and on. There is no other material that humans have so deeply woven into our lives. We use plastics so readily and so often that it might actually be impossible to stop. 7.7 million square miles of Pacific water are littered with an unimaginable amount of plastic debris in the form of microplastics. This is slightly larger than the entire land area of Canada and the United States, combined. These microplastics are plastic pieces smaller than 5 millimeters in length and can come from sources such as being weathered down from larger debris or even being manufactured as tiny microbeads which are used in consumer products such as some kinds of toothpaste. Microplastics are a great concern simply due to how little is known about how they interact with the environment, wildlife, and with humans. They have been found in human blood, babies, and people’s lungs. They are found in both water and air. The very things which humans need for survival are polluted with microplastics. Research suggests connections between plastic ingestion and adverse health impacts which makes quantifying the amount of microplastics in our ecosystems vital. We want to explore the local watershed of UMD and characterize the microplastics situation from the perspective of suburban campus impacts.