New PhD candidate for modelling impacts of marine plastics

My name is Marthe Alnes Høiberg, and I am a new PhD student at the Industrial Ecology Programme in the Department of Energy and Process Engineering at NTNU.

I have a background in biology and industrial ecology, and I have always had a strong fascination for the ocean and an interest in working for the conservation of nature and biodiversity. Owing to this, I am very excited to be a part of ATLANTIS!

Within this project, I will be working on developing life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) models to quantify the impacts of plastic debris on marine ecosystems. This is an urgent need in environmental assessments in general and in the LCA framework in particular, as the potential for adverse effects of mismanaged plastic is currently left unaccounted for, due to the lack of a comprehensive methodology.

Through my master thesis written under the supervision of Prof. Francesca Verones at NTNU, I already had the chance to explore this topic, and worked specifically on the impact pathway of entanglement of marine fauna in macroplastic debris. Going further with this research and developing an operational effect factor (EF) for this impact pathway is the first goal of my research as a PhD student.