Aeron Sim Shih Win, Chan Wan Ting, Karnati Sai Abhishek, Liu Yanru, Ong Tiong Ho Sean
Academic Advisor: Mr. Lim Cheng Puay
Coastal cleanups are a highly effective way to remove marine debris and they play an important role in protecting our marine ecosystem. Meso-plastics (debris ranging from 5mm – 25mm) are of particular concern as they are readily ingested by marine life, travel and accumulate up the food chain, and eventually end up in humans. Furthermore, it breaks down into microplastic (<5mm ) with time which has more detrimental impacts. Hence, it is important that this group of marine debris is removed effectively. However, the act of removing meso-sized trash is an inconvenient and labour intensive process. It is also often not cleared by contractors nor collected by cleanup volunteers. Thus, our group aims to explore the use of tools for coastal cleanup participants and organizations to increase the effectiveness of removing meso-plastics which would otherwise be a labour intensive process. To test this out, we used a basket to pick meso-plastics during coastal cleanup sessions. Our prototype basket effectively helped us collect 800 pieces of meso-plastics within a fixed area and time frame of 20 minutes as compared to 150 pieces of meso-plastics collected by the traditional hand-picking method under the same conditions. The results show that our prototype works and the utilization of our tools greatly eases the process of removing marine debris. As a result, we hope to make our prototype part of the preparation package for all coastal cleanup organizations in Singapore to make the removal of meso-plastics more effective.
Keywords: Biodiversity; Marine life; Waste management; Coastal cleanup;