Fulton Schools Professor Rolf Halden, director of ASU’s Center for Environmental Health Engineering, explains the ways research is revealing how plastics pollution can have toxic effects and other negative impacts on the environment, and on humans and other creatures. That’s the reason for the importance of what an all-female expedition team is doing while traversing a part of the Pacific Ocean known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. They’re collecting sand, water and air samples for studies to help gauge the magnitude and dangers of plastics waste in the planet’s oceans.