Abstract: Over the last few decades, staggering quantities of plastic debris have collected in the oceans. Unfortunately, the severity of this global challenge continues to outpace recycling and sustainability efforts. From a materials standpoint, numerous questions exist. For example, will these plastics degrade or accumulate? What attributes of a plastic contributes to degradation? Based on analysis of physical properties, molecular structure, and degradation behavior, this presentation will summarize environmental degradation trends. To capture the influence of molecular structure, our recent efforts have been inspired by advances in the fields of medicinal and physical chemistry as well as Molecular Dynamics (MD) Simulations. The result of our interdisciplinary approach has created a unified method to predict hydrophobicity at a molecular level using computational partition coefficients (LogP).