This year in global goals, Fraser and I have been working on the UN sustainable development goal, life below water. Life below water involves the conservation of marine organisms. Part of this task is removing plastics from our oceans.
Plastic pollution is a problem because it destroys our marine life. Many communities are reliant on this marine life as a source of food. Microplankton in the ocean produces at least half of the oxygen we breathe and absorbs a quarter of the carbon dioxide we emit into the air. Disrupting ocean ecosystems ruins this.
Not only this, but plastic pollution may be dangerous to humans too. When a marine organism consumes plastic, it stays inside the organism. If another animal eats it after that, it is also eating the plastic inside the organism. This process can lead to plastic being moved up the food chain to reach humans.
Microplastics are plastics less than 5mm in diameter. Microplastics can come in the form of raw plastics or in the form of larger plastics that have been broken down. Microplastics are especially nasty as they are hard to detect, are difficult to remove and are easily eaten by fish and other marine organisms. Microplastic pollution can be found outside of the water system as well. Studies estimate that the average person eats 5 grams of microplastics a week. The health effects of eating microplastics are largely unknown.
Currently, microplastics make up 80% of ocean debris. Ten million tons of plastic enter the ocean each year. One hundred and fifty million tons are in the ocean right now. Of those 600 000 tons are microplastics.
A while back, students at All Saints’ College worked on a machine that separates microplastics from sand. This machine was called the Microplastix Machine. While it worked, it had a few problems. It had a wonky leg, the brackets were coming apart, it was hard to move around, it needed some lubricant and it had a few other problems. Charlie and Peter from Metis engineering invited Fraser and I to help make a better version of the Microplastix Machine, and we accepted. After talking with them, we decided that before building a new model, we should test the effectiveness of the current version first and troubleshoot any faults.
After a slight delay due to poor weather, we went out to a beach and went to 3 sites within the beach. We originally intended to collect 10 cm of topsoil in a square meter from each site and filter it through the Microplastix Machine. However, the sand was too wet. We instead collected as much sand as we could within the square meter. While we haven’t yet weighed the microplastics, we did gather a decent amount. We do not know how much microplastic the machine couldn’t filter.
A major setback we had was that we couldn’t communicate with the engineers for a lot of the project. This severely limited what we could do.
If we could do this again, we would have thought more about the sampling method we used. A large part of the problem with our project is that our sampling method involved us digging too deep and ending up with too much wet sand, which is difficult to filter through the machine. If we had decided to dig less deep, we would have significantly more accurate results as well as a method any group working on the Microplastix Machine in the future could use to test later prototypes.
If we were to continue this, the next step would likely be to build the second prototype based on the data we collected, collect new data if ours isn’t adequate, or test other areas to see which places have the most microplastics.