Empowering youth for microplastics prevention
- Projets
- Experimentation and Data Collection
- Empowering youth for microplastics prevention
Empowering youth for microplastics prevention
- SciCo
- info@scico.gr
- From the 1st of June 2023 to the 30th of November 2024
- Greece
- Website of the organization
The initiative “Empowering Youth for microplastics prevention” targets 11-14 year olds in primary and secondary schools from 10 different regions of Greece in order to engage them in a hands-on educational project. The programme will provide teachers and schools with the necessary training and toolkit in order to run specialised field work in coastal areas. More specifically, through following a scientific protocol, students will perform a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of microplastic pollution in Greek beaches. The project will empower the students and their teachers to understand the magnitude of a problem which is invisible to the eye and subsequently inspire them to take on civic responsibility and serve as future environmental advocates.
The concept was developed based on knowledge derived by the microplastics team of the National Geographic Nautilus expedition in 2022. This effort shall be using STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Arts Mathematics) teaching methods and principles in addition to the traditional methodologies used in other environmental initiatives.
In this project, the SciCo team will create methodology standards specifically for locating microplastics in coastal locations. A consultant statistician who will create a suitable sampling methodology will work on this initiative, according to the protocols found in environmental literature. Plastics and microplastics characterization sheets already created by academia and research teams will be used, in order to incorporate the project’s data from the schools’ contribution, to wider networks and databases.
It is forecasted that the SciCo will ask the schools to perform sampling and collect data from 10 different Greek coastlines, ideally in areas where no similar measurements have been obtained previously. Concepts such as data collection and analysis, microscope observation, categorization etc will be the basis of the STEAM educational approach. The SciCo team will then ask students to use the microplastics they have collected as a source for art pieces. These will be on display at SciCo’s team-organized events “Mednight” and “Athens Science Festival” in 2023.
