Many people in our community don't realize that they could be unknowingly eating loads of plastic everyday. Micro-plastics are polluting our local watershed. My students have a plan to track the pollutants and educate the community on how to stop polluting our watershed with plastics.
"If you were to eat a fish that swallowed micro-plastic and you eat the fish, would you have the plastic in you?" This was the question one of my students asked during a presentation leading up to Earth Day on reducing the use of plastic in our everyday lives.
My students are part of a urban public school with a high rate of poverty. We live near a large watershed and our community depends a lot on the revenue that sport fishing brings to our area. We have been working this year with several local conservation agencies to raise the awareness of invasive species in our local watershed. We never thought about plastic being something that would harm our watershed. Micro plastics have been found in our area bay at a significant level. My students want to know how far this pollutant has penetrated our local rivers and small lakes. We would like to answer our question, "Could we be eating our own plastic waste?"
My Project
To answer this question, we are working with NOAA, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Agency, The Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and the NE Michigan Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative. My students have developed a plan to sample three local sites looking for the presence of micro plastics. We will use the plankton nets to collect samples from the main branch of the river, a small local lake, and the bay. In areas that the water is deeper, we have built our own underwater robots (ROVs) and we will engineer micro plastic sampling nets that will fit on the ROV to take samples at deeper water depths. In addition, we recently learned that micro plastics can be found in beach sand. We will use the coffee filters and strainers to sift through a few of our local beaches to see if micro plastics are in the sand. In addition, students will develop a presentation that they will share with other classrooms to raise the awareness of reducing our use of plastics and discarding them properly.
Education should be an adventure focused on solving real world problems.
Students come to school ready to engage in the everyday learning because they want to solve this problem. It makes education have worth to them and they feel empowered by doing something important.
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