Udo Gattenlöhner is an agricultural scientist and managing director of the Global Nature Fund (GNF), a non-profit foundation for the environment and nature founded in 1998 with its head office in Radolfzell on Lake Constance. The foundation coordinates among other things the international network Living Lakes, which has 135 member lakes, and operates worldwide for the protection of lakes and waterways. The Global Nature Fund, together with the Lake Constance Foundation and several Italian partners, founded the project "BLUE LAKES", which is actively supported among others by the plastics producers at Plastics Europe. The project is focused on the avoidance and reduction of the discharge of microplastics into lakes (see the report "Project "LIFE BLUE LAKES" fights microplastic in lakes").

In its "Close-up" series, Deutsche Welle portrayed in a thirty-minute film the work of the "pioneer of microplastics research", Professor Dr. Christian Laforsch, and the team from the Collaborative Research Centre at the University of Bayreuth. As the film shows, some of the basic research on microplastics there involves the use of measuring equipment that was specially developed and built at the university. In the interdisciplinary team, scientists are also working together with the plastics industry on alternatives to conventional plastics that would not end up as microplastics in the environment.

A large proportion of the litter that has accumulated in the subtropical vortex of the North Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii in the so-called "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" (GPGP) originates, according to a recent study, directly at sea and is caused by very few countries. According to the study, which has been published in “Scientific Reports” by a research group from the Dutch non-profit organisation “The Ocean Cleanup”, the garbage vortex contains mostly fishing nets, ropes and other waste from industrial fishing.

The larvae of a beetle species native to Central and South America can apparently survive with the plastic polystyrene as their only food source and even gain weight by ingesting it. This was the finding of a new study by the Australian University of Queensland, published in the journal Microbial Genomics. The researchers were able to demonstrate that the larvae of the species Zophobas morio (large black beetle), known as "superworms," are able to digest polystyrene (PS) thanks to the microbes in their intestines.