A growing issue is with the danger to sea life which includes beaches and with nurdles (virgin plastic) ending up in the waters during production and shipping because of the constant demand for plastic, this problem may only grow.

With social enterprise Microplastix, students from Propeller Industries, Project STEM class, Sustainability Club, and teachers like Ms Strentz we first tested the trommel at Cottesloe beach!

What may a trommel be?

It’s a device that sifts through the sand to remove the tiny microplastics, which I find an awesome opportunity to clean the beaches even more effective and perhaps could help people in the community help too!

The legs and other parts of the trommel was made by us from using the 3D printer and Precious Plastics machines such as the shredder and extruder for the beams.

We tested it on the last day of Term 3 and I was more surprised that there’s so much microplastics that you could even pick them up around the area people weren’t sitting around.  You could only imagine the number of plastics that might’ve flown off to sea or underneath the layers of sand. After sifting through it the sand appeared much cleaner and we were with ideas of improvement.

We have plans to run another test next year!

->This is a video of the trommel in action by people from the UK