thank you all for joining us today this is the student showcase on confronting the Plastics crisis um this is part of a plastic policy policy Workshop that Rachel Care Sick um can you read through this interview at the Nicholas Institute organized um we have a great lineup so is it part of a larger Workshop bringing together researchers from adult Halsey University we have Dr Tony Walker here if you wouldn't mind just convenience researchers from the Norwegian Institute for water research which is a little late in Norway right now so maybe they're online if they're brave but I I'm not quite convinced of that um we have Dr C Fletcher an entire March from the University of Portsmouth Global Plastics policy Center and some Shameless advertising for another event that you'll probably find interesting we have a lunch and learn um coming up on oh apologies we have a bunch of learn coming up this is the wrong advertisement this is an Advertiser for the event you're at um unnecessary but there is going to be a lot to learn on Thursday um with these folks from Fort Smith talking about everything from using enzymes to biodegrade plastic to fashion and transition transdisciplinary perspectives for addressing the plastic crisis so a little bit about um some of what we have going on at Duke here so right before the Copa pandemic myself and some other folks founded this classification working group we're an open group so if you're not yet a part of it you're welcome to join right now have 50 members across 13 departments ranging from the Department of History to the Cancer Institute everything in between and we're comprised of Faculty students staff and now some alumni as well and if you don't know me yet I'm a PhD candidate here at Duke I'm defending in a week so that alumni bucket will go up one I'm in Marine Science and conservation and my research focus is on interdisciplinary perspectives of classification so just to give you an idea these are the range of the different groups that are involved in the plastic pollution working group um we have quite a mighty group here and we've set up on this mission to apply an interdisciplinary approach to better understand plastic pollution issues to inform Equitable and effective Solutions and we want to be this competing space serving as the central hub for students staff faculty Learners at all levels who are interested in plastic detection um and I think this event here today is really a great um sort of uh microcosm of that we have students at all levels from different perspectives who are going to be presenting on plastic pollution and their research so one more Shameless plug for the working group um check out our updated website and we have a recent special issue we came out with as well with uh these different papers we have Classics from one Health perspective environmental justice perspective and so on and uh we're on social media so you can stay up to date uh events like this that are going on um as well as some of our latest research and highlighting researchers and so on um through that through that manner so what are we doing today um we're starting off there have been many different technologies that have been proposed and invented with the explicit aim of addressing plastic pollution um there's already so much waste in the environment and waste that's ending up in landfills so we'll first hear from Madison Griffin who will be talking about plastic Kingdom Technologies and um are they working what are some gas in the effect of these measures then we'll be hearing about a Duke recycling center so focusing in on campus um from chill and or not we'll be Switching gears and then moving into the arcs looking at using humor to talk about microplastics and then ending with policy so reducing single-use Plastics here in North Carolina as well as strengthening the evidence base and looking at are these policies actually working and with that I will be handing it off so Madison so Madison Griffin is a germ native and a biology major she it has minors in environmental science and policy and education spent the past two years working with the plastic pollution working group as well as Folks at the Nicholas Institute studying plastic pollution she's been working to increase diversity in stem for two years by code by developing curriculum for the health and environment Scholars Program which is co-led by Nicholas Institute staff outside of class in research Madison is a member of ladyblue One of Duke's all female identifying acapella groups thank you Madison thank you everyone they enjoyed with an infection and hi I'm Madison um thank you so much for coming and today I'm going to talk about my research about the gaps in cleanup Effectiveness the influential impact of plastic cleanup Technologies so if my research is a follow-up to this paper that came out in 2020 uh This research group is from duke and it created the plastic pollution prevention and collection and Technology inventory as a way to compile innovative solutions out there technologies that are trying to clean up plastic pollution around the world this is from the Nicholas Institute website I encourage you guys to check it out after this session so what is a technology for our research we defined it as devices that reduce the amount of plastic pollution oh perfect so yeah um we provide technology as devices that reduce the amount of plastic pollution from entering oceans and rivers or extract existing plastic pollution from waterways including those that aim to prevent plastic pollution from entering water's Upstream promotions with rivers what's really cool is it can look like a lot of different things so I'll just give two examples now this is the hula one it can vacuum sand and debris and separate plastic from Sand based on their buoyancy this is based out of Canada and then this is the great bubble barrier it uses tubes on the bottom of a Waterway and through pumping air it creates this bubble barrier that creates a current to bring debris to the surface and guide it to the catchment system so a lot of different diversity and Technology going on here so getting into how we found these Technologies this was a very big literature review we reviewed non-peer-reviewed literature and um screened these news articles business websites Etc to find new technologies uptake technologies that were already there and extract non-peer-reviewed Effectiveness data and then we did a similar thing for peer-reviewed literature so finding any new technologies extracting peer-reviewed effects data and ecological impact and then we created these Effectiveness metrics which I'll talk about later slides to analyze that Effectiveness data so these are some of the parameters we looked at the table on the left shows what was already studied in Schmaltz but um when I started this project I was really interested in figuring out if these Technologies were really effective or just is there research on what these Technologies can actually do where are they implemented do they have any impacts and seeing what's out there so that's really what my study focuses on so first I'll walk you through just the results from updating an inventory and how we did those analyzes there were 47 Technologies in the original paper and we added 56 and 22 so now we have a total of 109 Technologies in the inventory which is really exciting um and all the ones that were in the original paper 31 are still in use today and three progressed to being in use and even one progressed to being in testing phases so this really shows how the world is moving forward and getting more Technologies out there and implementing them in waterways of the technology 79 of them are collection Technologies and 24 are prevention as you can see by the green a lot of these Technologies are in use which is again really really exciting even more exciting significantly more technologies have been invented over time so in 1964 there was only one recorded technology being invented that year but in 2020 which you can't see that's now up to 24. so again you can really see this increasing and my data is up to Mid 2022 that's when I might get a collection stopped so I'm sure if it went back now you can see it's still increasing and not really a drop off there so again there's a global push for getting these Technologies out there and these Technologies are implemented around the world so the most of them are in the United States Indonesia and Australia but if you account for the fact that a lot of these Technologies Target plastic and waterways you can see in this map that a lot of the coastal countries have at least one technology so again at level issue with global Solutions and 73 of the technologies that were in use reported where they are so now I'll get into more detail about the effectiveness metrics this is how we created a description of the language used to report the effectiveness data in both peer-reviewed and non-peer-reviewed services so the first one is total amount of plastic collected or removed and that is exactly what it sounds like it's the total amount of plastic but what's important to note here is that it's over an unspecified number of collections over a larger time scale so for example six star since starting operation in October 2020 Zoom God sample trash barriers have collected 650 000 kilograms of plastic very similarly there's amount of permission the difference here is that now there's a specific number of collections happening in over a smaller time scale so example each clear box collects of up to one time per day there's also percent capture and efficiency again just like how it sounds usually a percentage that reports plastic removal plastic capture or efficiency rate of the technology so for example the coral wall removes at least 31 of microfibers that would have otherwise flowed out of a washing machine there are also targets these aren't cleanup objective or goal to reach within the next few years so for example the goal of the ocean cleanup project is to be able to remove 90 of floating ocean plastic by 2040. and lastly there are technological limits so these are any physical limit of a technology whether it pertains to battery life how long it can go weight capacity how far I can go in one trip Etc so for example each unit of the waste shark can run has a runtime of about seven to eight hours so let's apply these to non-peer-reviewed effects this is Effectiveness data from news articles business websites species policy briefs and reports so we found that 58 of our Technologies actually have this non-peer-reviewed data but we can see that the technology types that are studied in that way is really different so technology types like River booms technologies that go inside your laundry machine boats and wheels those are studied a lot in terms of their effectiveness but as we can see over on the left miscellaneous leakage protection miscellaneous capture drugs and robots those Technologies aren't studied in terms of their effectiveness as much as the others and if we talk about the way that they are reporting this Effectiveness we found that there's 102 total reports of Effectiveness because it's a single data point as you can imagine one technology can have multiple data for Effectiveness and the language is pretty actively used except for a Target when we look at it on a larger scale across technology types you can see there's a lot going on across the board a lot of different Technologies are using different ways to report their data even with name technology types there's different language different statistics being used there's no real consistency in how the world is talking about the effectiveness of this technology so this shows that not only is there a research Gap in studying what how effective Technologies are this is limiting the application of these Technologies because they're inconsistency in the language used to report that these measurements are pretty incomparable if they're not on the same scale what makes it hard to think about how you can apply these in the real world and make decisions about where these Technologies can go and again we see that targets aren't really used as a metric to Define so now let's do the same thing for our peer-reviewed Effectiveness visit Effectiveness that has been validated by Journal editors research Scholars and so we found that only 11 of our Technologies had both non-peer-reviewed and peer-reviewed Effectiveness um so we hypothesized that the non-period effectiveness might be greater than the peer-reviewed due to potential bias and say news articles and business websites try to get people to buy their technology this was actually only true for these four Technologies and five of them actually disproved a hypothesis for three the effectiveness reports were the same for both sources and for the bottom two the peer-reviewed documents was actually greater so the bias we expected wasn't really seen here but going back to the effectiveness metrics in that language as you can see by this pie chart in the peer-reviewed data people are reporting this heavily at a percent capture and efficiency then again looking at it from technology type level again keeping in mind only 11 technology could represented here but it is a lot more standard across the board and within technology so what we know from here is not only is there an extreme Gap and Technologies being studied in a peer-reviewed vigorous way there is more standardized language though within the technology types making it very easy to compare Technologies to each other and make executive decisions um and this is actually already being done in papers that have been released very recently beginning of this year late last year that came up after this study people are using this um percent capture and efficiency to compare technology types to each other to help better inform decision making and as we saw the non-peer-reviewed effectiveness is less biased than we expected the last thing I'm going to talk about is ecological impact we have positive neutral and negative ecological impact and this is under any Assumption of in addition to the assumed benefit of a technology of moving plastic from the environment so only five Technologies had ecological impact data so again another Gap in understanding how these Technologies can impact their environment aside from just cleaning up plastic but for the ones that did one of them had positive impacts these magnetic foils um they emit some sort of chemical reaction to break down microclassics but it was found that they can serve as a carbon source for algae growth Mr trashfield had a neutral ecological impact um even though it was found that Wildlife can get on that conveyor belt and seeing their picture it moves slowly enough that it didn't Escape before entering the dumpster inside but um three Technologies were found to have pretty negative impacts um the C bin shown in the bottom has a lot of animal bycatch being ocean cleanup systems it was found that zooplankton can be killed from encountering the skirts of the troll that it has and then for clean trash um when encountered encountering strong winds and high waves of Technology can actually endanger the environment around it so some of the suggestions that we found to kind of mitigate these negative ecological impacts are from more active cleanup Technologies to cool them very slowly avoid feeding grounds of magnify and like whales and sharks and to try to only skip a surface and though that would be better for reducing negative ecological impacts that might actually reduce the efficiency of cleaning up the plastic itself because these feeding grounds on the surface tend to be when the plastic it's just based on how ocean currents work so complex issue about the data is kind of out there so moving forward into the future I started this I ended this data collection in mid-2022 and even since then there's been so much more Technologies being written about we get a lot of emails being like at the start inventory please so this is a very big Global effort so we have to continue to update this inventory and make it public for not just the public to know that other stakeholders and governments to really make these decisions if we're going to do that we first have to fill these gaps in effective this data and ecological impact for these new solutions to really have the impact that we intend them to do we have to know how they work and what works best in different situations and the way that we think we can do that is to standardize the language which is reported make it so it's very easy to compare them apply to different situations around the world so say you can say that this technology would be great for the plastic crisis in Kenya but this one would be better for what we're seeing in North Carolina stuff like that from new forward but um I'm writing a paper about this so be on the lookout and hoping to get it published soon but um that thank you and I'd be happy to take any questions great work um can you say a little bit more about this or are these all pretty much just like at the testing phase or are there any areas where the Technology's really been scaled up have a pretty significant interception rate for Plastics in a particular area I think they are beginning to have that impact but again the data is not really out there yet at least for what I saw when I was doing the data collection but I think some of the more popular technology to say but this blue thing on the on the far right that's I actually just saw that experiment with the other day put it in your laundry machine it's supposed to catch the microfibers inside and those are sold everywhere um there are kind of bigger Technologies being used at a local scale but I just don't think that data is published about that yet but it's starting to be yeah but thanks Madison this is great work I know there's going to be a big audience for this when when it comes out I'm just curious have you seen of the technologies that you have in there how many of them are used specifically for prevention or Cleanup in rivers or streams or estuary mounts and is it possible um to even come up with say categories or archetypes of these Technologies maybe some for like microfibers only or just thinking if that would be easy to be curious to see how much of the technology and The Innovation is really matched to where we know the big sources of leakage are yes that's a great question I don't know the numbers off the top of my head but I think there's around 10 large well not large scale but Boons Four Rivers specifically and I do think that technology for rivers in particular is also growing as a field because a lot of them early on before sources but there are ones I can work just for Rivers I don't need a number out the top of my head I pods but for macro plastic versus microplastic I don't know the exact numbers but there are a lot a lot more for macro plastic and I think that's just because it's very hard to clean up micro plastic most of the ones for laundry machines and laundry filters are from microplastics though coming from synthetic fibers in your clothes but yeah I think this majority of macro plastic right now but there are some interesting ones with micro plastic I'd be happy to talk more about that cameras yeah this is more just about some of the applications which you which you can get into quite well and less about the study but things like the Coral walls and things like collect microfibers in the washing machine and things today then go on to describe how consumers might deal with the waste that it collects in in some instances do they provide conditions for that and how they might dispose of that way so is there a risk that in itself just gets washed down the drain um you know poorly managed yeah so I think that is technology to dependent there's one filter I know of specifically linked on a name but it attaches to the outside of your washing machine and then they have a system where you would like rotate through devices and you would send it back to them and then the company will help you dispose of it but I do think a lot of them the after part of the collection is when we talk about for consuming reviews which is definitely something that should be talked about in more detail on a company and yeah and in fact John probably uh the part of the question I was going to ask well done this great uh great topic great subject and it will be a massive appetite but you find it um so of those 102 studies you already into the fact that very few deal with microplastics and if they do in concentration fibers and sourcing in your device um I have a student if you haven't already been connected with um by Rachel who's specifically interested in capturing microplastics in a in a freshwater lake in Northern Canada but applications everywhere and she's been in contact with the company I don't know if you've uh aware of them or it's one of those newbies that have come on board after you finish your search called polygon and they're based in in-states I think actually I think Zoe you just sent that to me I think a couple weeks ago so not in this study but I have read the website so it's one of the ones not included here but hopefully added to the inventory well something to think about today actually thank you yeah thank you so a nice transition there on what do we do with all the ways that we've produced um we are now going to hear from Rochelle your belly and Arnav Singh we have a presentation on the Duke Plastics recycling center and what can we do on campus with some of the plastic waste that we've generated so Rochelle is a biomedical engineering major from West Hartford Connecticut where she'll enjoy building and creating has a strong motivation to find solutions that can help the environment he's involved in computational biology research focused on the immune system and is also a basis in the Duke Jazz Ensemble Arnav is a German native and a biomedical engineering major he loves to create devices that can help have a direct and immediate impact on his community he's involved in campus organizations like quad X where he serves as president of the Wannamaker quad and vertices which is an academic Journal that he has a senior editor of so thank you so much hey everyone we are Dartmouth Duke Advance Recycling Center and before we Dive In so what we're going to start with is give a brief summary of the problem and we'll have in mind for our initiative then we're going to dive in and take a closer look at what is the current recycling infrastructure not only on campus but just around the world in general we're also going to look at how dark ourselves we can address these challenges and kind of impact on mitigating the amount of plastic pollution on campus in five different steps they're going to dive into the technical aspects of what makes our organization so specific stuff like the machine design the cost the location and more broadly the journey that plastic waste once it enters organization is going to take to be developed into eventual class of products we're going to then discuss the feasibility of such a program and the implementivity finally we're going to end with discussing our next steps and where we can go from there so in one sentence our main goal for our organization is to turn single-use plastic short life products such as classic water quality by Costco that are otherwise thrown out really quickly in large quantities it's a long-term use plastic products such as a reusable plastic we're planning on doing is creating a plastic recycling workspace here directly on Duke University campus to deal with the pollution we create as a university so we're trying to do is have campus plastic waves be turned into Plastic Products and then our goals are beautiful first we want to mitigate the actual contribution that Duke University has as a whole to the plastic pollution pandemic and then second you also want to serve because we are a research institution serve as an educational research for both Duke and the local theorem Community to show how plastic can be recycled into such a small scale the workplace itself is going to consist of a series of machines that are responsible for shredding that we're going to melt extrude eventually mold plastic eventual final products that make you decide we envisioned this product to be Urban Workshop to be cross-disciplinary where whatever the sale of the Plastic Products we produce is going to be then driven to added to increase revenue for the worst place itself we know that often otherwise that there is a large barrier into keeping these things running but we see that because of the cross-disciplinary approach there's going to be a cyclical approach to the nature where we'll have increased funding from actual work that we do finally there's a lot of research opportunities here at Duke University to learn more about the plaster cycling and then further studies where we can decrease the pollution and increase sustainability efforts so now um now that we've sort of laid out what we are planning on doing with our organization we're going to dive into a bit of a problem the challenges with recycling plastic in the status quo each year we produce about 400 million tons of plastic waste of which only nine percent of plastic is recycled doesn't mean that the vast majority of the plastic ends up in landfills it's incinerated or ends up in our ecosystem my oceans or or various different parts of our ecosystem um since 1980 plastic production has grown tremendously however the plastic recycling bait has remained relatively constant and by 2050 our plastic production is expected to increase three times but it looks like a recycling rate is going to remain relative so why is a recycling rate relatively short well recycling facilities in the status will have to manage all different types of plastic there are all different types of those this includes things like paper glass aluminum as well as plastic and so what this does is it makes sorting plastic becoming very difficult and labor intensive oftentimes a plastic cell clean it's not put in a proper state or it can easily recycled and as a result of that a lot of the plastic that people do put in these recycling bins ends up going into the landfill also the recycling plastic is less durable and is more expensive what this means is that companies are have a less of an incentive to use recycled plastic when they're developing their new products and so this means they're recycling plastic Market is relatively another thing is that the U.S tends to
support tends to export is plastic waste to other countries and so what and so but in 2017 countries like China and Thailand which have taken a lot of the U.S um plastic plastic waste have banned these exports what this means is that there's a lot of plastic waste here domestically in the United States and a lot of places don't have the proper recycling infrastructure to handle all of this space and as a result a lot of this space does end up in the landfills it does end up including our environment so what does this mean at the individual level how does this affect us on a day-to-day basis as we all are aware like the whole concept of recycling has been sort of harped at us since we've since we're done and in the college and even in the winter and so what this does to the creative walls um false impression that your recycling plastic but the reality of the situations a lot of this plastic that we think is being recycled ends up going um into the landfills and into our ecosystem as pollution there's a thing called wish cycling where people put like items that they think that they can be recycled into the recycling bin when the reality of the situations like recycled is probably not going to be recycled so how is our organization going to address some of these issues that we see with the current infrastructure and recycling so we have sort of despite impact framework waste diversion waste reduction environment equity research and Innovation Community influence and a bit more introduce what we mean by waste diversion is that we're going to divert the waste of otherwise landfills and oceans through recycling center that we have here entities what this does is that we're going to broadly limit the plastic sheet the Duke University as a whole contributions environment you also see that we can limit carbon emissions as the vast majority um a vast majority of like plastic also does get considerated as well here we also have our second impact we expect and so what this means is this is where sort of our educational component of our organization is going to play an apartment we're going to sort of educate individuals and provide them with the resources how to properly recycle plastic we also have since we are going to like recite the plastic in our center it's going to have an Hands-On approach and oftentimes that Hands-On approaches tend to inspire people this also means that we're not just limiting to how we can recycle but also go back to the first principle so I'm like what it means to also use our plastic consumption and how we can reuse Plastics we also have we also have environment since the US tends to export a lot of its toxic waste to other countries you're putting the burden of our waste on other countries we aren't even really contributing to the plastic then what this does is that we are puts a burden on these countries when the burden should be in place on the people who are actually contributing to on the pollution and so what could this community recycling based approach does is that it provides an environmental instance lastly on research and Innovations it provides opportunities for students depending in the plastic space this could also be look like improved in recycling Machinery creating new Plastic Products and also creating alternatives to plastic lastly um we have Community influence should we be able to create a very successful recycling sector here on campus we can Inspire other communities to take action on recycling this could include other university campuses neighborhoods and communities in the development world as well so now we're going to go into some of the feasibility and technicality prior to us there's this organization called the precious plastic organization that has already done sort of plastic recycling creative machines as shown here that turn into products as shown on the right I mean this has also been done at other Union universities as well such as Monash University in Australia Ohio State University University of Houston and so these are some of the devices that specifically Monash University is created to recycle plastic and as you can see it's a very compact device that can really be transported really be used as well here we envisioned that we have two types of recycling Machinery have low Fidelity Machinery High Fidelity machine the slope of the LED machineries Machinery that can be produced at a simple produce simple Machinery produced at a simple cost you can develop it right away I'm impressive required more manual labor and limited scope which is where the hyper downloading Machinery allows us to create a way more level of digress products and if there's more automation there's a requirement some of this low Fidelity Machinery looks like turning plastic water bottles into plastic string and also creating um tote bags um and room as well yeah and the tote bags some of the High Fidelity Machine Products look like some of these comments shown here and as you can see they're far more diverse um in terms of steps in terms of how we want to recycled plastic there are several like Steps sort of go over here one is obviously plastic collection this is going to involve sort of different actors that we have here on Google and how we're going to collect the plastic waste from them um the second is sorting color you can be able to sort this plastic based off color but when you stopped a pretty plastic type next is cleaning the plastic one options to clean the plastic in order for interview cycles and washing it there's also a clever system where we can like Shred the plastic first and then we also have shredding so we're going to shred the plastic into smaller this is what it allows it to be a lot easier to developed and more the plastic using um an injector is one way where you put pellets into heated barrel and injecting um there's also a compressor which would make it with flat sheets of plastic as well as also an extruder where you can turn plastic and make it into in terms of how like how much it would cost for all these machines um answer this is an outline of all of that so we'd love to hear from you guys all any questions or comments you might have to deal this is a great example of the community as a living lab uh because you've got the solution and the education and the increased awareness which hopefully will change everybody's behavior on campus and Beyond and so that's awesome um did uh will you because have you done this year it was still conceptual no so we're right now in the fastest machine 25 000 a grant funding it immediately upon approval we hope to buy the products in the machine so we can start getting the center set up so that's what we're waiting on right now okay excellent so then my next question to that then is when you get it set up next week let's say um have you got a system already established then on how you separate pet from you know other types of uh you know resin codes and then even within pet what how are you going to deal with dies so like okay you can have a clear BT bottles and then occasionally you might get through so you're going to separate that too yeah so they're obviously we're still sort of survivating how we want to do all of that I think our main focus is to instead of like collecting a broad sort of aspect of all types of plastic as you mentioned like focus on sort of one type of plastic as we start off and then as as you mentioned like sort the plastic waste in terms of different colors and then sort of recycle it on the downstream from there another idea that we've also thought about is specifically recycling through plastic waste our three printer plastic waste um and so especially at Duke and a lot of universities there's a lot of ways that's produced just off of 3D printers and so that's also another sort of plastic area that we focus on is recycling that as well it's like if you've done any Outreach with like Administration since I feel like it fits into a lot of like the Duke uh climate commitment goals like Waste Management on campus um my other one was like um whether it'll only be limited to on-campus waste since you said like um it would have some impacts on your community and like obviously said Duke is a big contributor to waste in Durham but also waste endurance also follows into um even eastern North Carolina yeah absolutely so and to answer your first question so we actually applied for the grant funding under the climate sustainability Grant so right here like as soon as president price uh announced that that's what we applied for um so we'd already identified several sources revenue on campus one of the main ones is going to be do dining in the Friedman Center so we've been talking with their head Rabbi so they have their weekly Shabbat dinners and they produce a lot of plastics so in our conversation with them they've expressed strong interest to recycle out a small scale Deposit they produce and create a sustainable Revenue where they can create new Plastic Products for the use at their weekly spot dinners the issue with Duke dining is at it's very decentralized in the sense that every different vendor you see on Duke there's like seven different ones they all send their plastic to a different collection program and so the issue with that is not only is there increased cost University as well because they have to be shipping these metric tons out to all these different distribution centers but also that it's decentralized because we don't have good numbers on who's producing how much so what we hope to create out of this is right is recycling on campus we can essentially create like Duke's first ever climate significantly and plastic budget and we can identify that okay where are the big sources of plastic coming from and then from there we can create policy changes to decrease that that's your second question about the local Durham community so one of the main things we've identified is along with Outreach local Durham County Public Schools is with the creation of these tote bags so you can essentially press plastic and press cloth over it to create reusable tote bags so one thing we identified with local shopping markets such as the air seater and Whole Foods off East Campus we can give sell these tote bags to them so when customers come in oftentimes like let's say you forget to bring your recyclable bag it's like you don't always want to spend five dollars every single visit and not everybody can afford to be spending five dollars every visit to buy a new recyclable tote bag that can give these bags to the customers which then they can use instead of all them like 50 plastic bags back to their car every single time they want to get groceries so that's more speaking on to the local therapy Park thank you next up will be Switching gears we'll be hearing your Laura asherman pronoun she her who is a documentary filmmaker and sculptor who's pursuing a master of Fine Arts grade experimental and documentary Arts her work has been featured on PBS spice and HBO where if the film was funded by the Indiana pharmacy Grant from Duke's Keenan Institute for ethics explores the boundaries of documentary and fiction and employees stop-motion animation and elements of absurdity to address microplastics to the human body so give it up to Laura hello my name is Laura asherman and I'm an MFA in experimental and documentary Arts today I'm going to talk briefly about my thesis film the dumpster dive hybrid documentary that aims to inform people outside of the scientific Community about the human health implications of microplastics for as long as I can remember I've been interested in understanding the link between consumerism and the global waste crisis last winter I read an article published by the Nicholas school co-authored by Rachel about the decrease in plastic prevention during covid and that really piqued my interest and so after meeting with her I decided this was going to be the path that I would take for my thesis project and here is a still from my film and this is in the New Hanover County landfill in Wilmington North Carolina so as I began to research the enormous um and very well documented plastic crisis I grew increasingly interested in microplastics I was pretty shocked to find out that as much as we know about how much microplastics humans are consuming on a weekly basis there seem to be very little research about exactly what the toxicology is of this microplastic consumption um and this is an image that I captured through a microscope of microplastics from the from Crabtree Creek which is part of the Neuse River Basin here in the Triangle so as I'm sure many people in this room have also seen um I went into a rabbit hole watching tons of environmental documentaries um and while I always learn something new when I watch these films I generally just walk away feeling pretty depressed and hopeless um and so I wondered how I could attract people who might be the ones who just straight up avoid these type of films um to watch my project and maybe start to care about microplastics So my answer um is well this is kind of in the way but that's Jason um my answer is to use absurdity and cockroaches in the dumpster dive cockroach News hosts Howard Scourge and Madison Von Berman report on how microplastics could have dire consequences for their species biggest nuisance humans Towing the line of documentary and fiction um the dumpster dive combines expert testimonial collage animation puppetry and live cockroaches to talk about microplastics with new audiences so why cockroaches people uh people always say that cockroaches will outlive the Apocalypse and it makes sense cockroaches have been around for a thousand times longer than humans that's about 300 million years um so I figured who better than cockroaches to talk about how humans are destroying the planet and themselves so the dumpster Dives target audience is people who are like who are more likely to turn on Adult Swim than the Discovery Channel I wanted to reach the section of the population who is aware of climate change and maybe they've even heard of microplastics um but they aren't interested in watching those documentaries that are going to make you feel bad and um you know want to die um and then furthermore according to a recent study titled how satirical news impacts effective responses learning and persuasion published in 2021 audiences who don't generally watch the news are more likely to engage with satirical news we all know John Oliver And The Tonight Show and these shows that kind of get you in with entertainment but then actually leave you more educated and interested in the top so um they also found that compared to regular news um uh satirical is had a stronger correlation with persuasion and positive uh change in people's behavior and um in the case of my project I thought about how talking about something as serious as microplastics using an absurd framework of cockroach News hosts could actually potentially change people's behavior who may not be watching this kind of work otherwise so I knew that I wanted to use um plastic garbage as a visual language in my film but I didn't want to start boarding all this plastic trash in my apartment um so I reached out to these incredible artists Richard Lang and Judith Selby Lang um who live in Northern California and have been collecting plastic from a thousand yard stretch of beach near their house for 25 years and so um this image on the right is one of their pieces from their Cavallo print series um and they use plastic in really beautiful ways to make all of their art and it's all photographed so they can reuse it and they have this enormous stockpile so for a week in January I went to their studio and set up my stop-motion animation set um and if you're not familiar with stop-motion animation the way it works is you take still images and then when you put them together it becomes a animated video and there's seamless movement um so this here you can see I used all yellow pieces um but they have every single type of plastic every color every type of object every size um all stored away and very well organized so I used a lot of this as Transitions and illustrations throughout my life so I also on top of the playful side of the film um it was really important to me to have some real science and there's some testimony of people who really know what they're talking about here is Dr Amari Walker Franklin who is a RTI researcher Duke PhD and the author of the new book plastic um and you can see we shot this interview on a green screen and then in the end she is talking into the dumpster where the cockroaches have their new stuff um here we have um Dr Barbara doll who's an ecological restoration scientist from North Carolina State University and this is shot in Crabtree Creek in Raleigh and this is where we collected water samples that you saw earlier those that um that sample with the microplastics is from uh this River and in this scene um Duke doctoral candidate in civil and environmental engineering Anna Lewis discusses how potentially toxic plastic additives can leach into their surrounding environments and so I would like to show you a quick sample of the film and this is the scene so um [Music] good evening Trey sub Howard hello I'm here at Duke University's Levine science research center with PhD candidate Anna Lewis [Music] hi there Miss Lewis thanks for having us bro pound it you're not going to touch me right whoa whoa it's not like that I'm not trying to get canceled here I'm an ally so Miss Lewis what are we like looking at today so today we're looking at black fibers that I pulled off of a waterproof fleece and you're going to be able to see the additives leeching off of those fibers in this case it's a strong solvent but this shows us the mechanism and we can deduce that the same sort of leaching will be happening in fresh water or even lung fluid Coco cool but like what are plastic additives so plastic additives are over 2700 different types of chemicals that are added to Everyday Plastic Products and they impart some sort of functional or aesthetic benefit to the plastic like making it more flexible or more colorful and as that plastic product ages it will break up into smaller and smaller pieces these microplastics then have a higher surface area and then more of the additives are able to Leach out over time into the surrounding environment word and so why exactly is this calls for a cockroach celebration what this is something that people need to be concerned about there are 68 additives that are identified as known carcinogens in everyday Plastic Products and 90 of them haven't even been studied properly yet the humans are poisoning themselves Priceless dog uh you're going back outside now right yeah totally right after lunch I thought I smelled some bologna in your bag mind if I take a bite um and so if creative block just goes wild when you're in here you come in here for one thing and you're in different sections and you came out with 15 different um all right so um if y'all are interested in seeing more of this uh silly film silly Interiors together um please come out to the thesis film screening it is on April 7th at 7 00 pm at The Nasher Museum of Art um I will send uh Zoe and Rachel a link to the Eventbrite um and you'll also see several other films from the MFA pieces so yeah any questions great way to reach different audiences how do you got in mind this first is the first screening that's coming up yes um have you got in mind a way to disseminate this once you online with me all right that's something I'm really built into um typically my films have gone through like a festival circuit um and then that shows mainly to people who are either really interested in film or other filmmakers so I'm definitely looking to share it with audiences um elsewhere and very much open to ideas to get outside of the film and artist bubble plus it's conference in Portsmouth in June that has a strong Arts based Elementary yes absolutely we should talk about that yeah yeah I just have a comment this that was absolutely stunning a great platform a multimedia to communicate a really serious problem but as you say uh with satire and and I think yeah the comedy angle just the absurdity you called it I think it just like drives in the message even more she can't ignore it it's brilliant thank you thank you foreign policy Clinic an interdisciplinary clinic at the Duke Law School Christians pursuing a master's degree in Environmental Management with a focus on environmental policy for classification reduction and sustainable fisheries management thank you Christian are you down well thank you very for the introduction again I'm Krishna spada today I'm going to be talking about reducing movies past explosion in North Carolina using some law in the house um just a little bit more about medium and pronouns are they them theirs is like sorry mentioned I'm a second year masters of Apartments management students studying environmental economics policy um and I like to say my focus is ocean policy uh focused on plastic pollution and sustainable fisheries management um this picture is actually me last week in Hawaii I got to volunteer and do a heat Ocean Beach cleanup uh right after this picture I fell off that you needed um but I previously worked with the Nicholas Institute with Rachel uh looking at policies in Estonia I've worked with John and he's my Master's project advisor so there's a lot of great opportunities for two students here um and one of them is a Duke environmental on a policy Clinic um so it's co-ed by Michelle Nolan right longest they're both uh lawyers here attorneys and the environmental law and policy Clinic their mission is to train the next generation of leaders to solve environmental problems and provide an access to Justice communities and some of the speakers in Laurie's video were higher participants so what are we talking about is North Carolina in a broad steps what we're seeing as far as Plastics and Plastics pollution um so first of all North Carolina's are really important oh it's just North Carolina but it's actually home to the second largest Estuary in the U.S uh the Albemarle Town Liquor uh Estuary and North Carolina has 325 miles of Beach and 1 000 miles of assuring Coast um so it offers habitat and ecosystems for a wide array of brain species or economy and for the environment but we currently have 61 federally threatened to education species in North Carolina that includes nine Birds species six reptiles PCS seven species of fish may know Turtle the leatherback turtle the gland of sturgeon short nose sturgeon bring sea turtles these sea turtles if you don't care about the environmental aspect of this you may care about the money aspects in North Carolina really relies on its Coastal industry they have an over one billion dollar fishing commercial and recreational fishery degree and that industry realize how we are on making sure that these ecosystems need to have tasks are clean so what's the big problem with plastic so plastic debris in particular has a couple of threats to marine life into human health we have invasive species transport that happened on these little plastic pieces moving about what time it's really dangerous for native plants vs we also see habitat damage when I was in Hawaii is very sad to see just how much plastic was in the ocean and in these coral reefs you have like fishing nets wrapped around these qualities it's very terrible we have entanglement with some marine species you can see some of these photos here from North Carolina uh we have this is just getting wrapped up and it's fishing nets and you may have seen the videos of like sea turtles with straws in their nose um we're also seeing Agni which is the term for the ingestion of some of these Plastics in these marine species which is very detrimental because these Plastics have toxic chemicals in them and so as these Plastics break down they're adjusted by fish or birds and stuff like that which is then interested by us that's really scary because you don't know what our microplastics have are Health impacts and I think it's estimated that every year there's about a credit card size of microplastics uh adjusted by each person um and in a new shocking study it was found that there was microplastics confuses of pregnant women um so we don't know where this is all going um there's also a huge climate issue it's estimated that 10 to 13 of the global greenhouse gas emissions budget is going to be accounted for past tense and in North Carolina we have a very specific case of sea turtles and sea birds so sea birds and coastal birds and sea turtles are more successful as in Plastics and physical damage in North Carolina so a 14-year study found that more than half of the seabird species in North Carolina had some sort of plastic in their guts a big problem for Birds is plastic bottle caps because they're very pretty in color and they pop around on the ocean surface so they think that's something that they can eat and then they end up and not all the Plastics are the same for sea turtles in North Carolina uh balloons are actually married to 32 times more deadly than other Plastics it was found to entangle them and cause programs to fall off because they're not getting blood circulation and it was found that the main thing that's attracting these turtles sea turtles so the Plastics actually was in the look of the Plastics but it's smell of the Plastics the odor resembles a lot of what they're eating and their natural habitat so they're going for balloons and these other plastic spaces so what are we doing at the long policy funding so we're working with our clients to develop strategies that produce caustics at the source so we have a two-pronged approach we have a state level action which are trying to identify some opportunities for state agencies to really reduce distinguished Plastics an awesome course the polystyrene band that's kind of a solid waste management act for North Carolina and then we're also doing a local level action which is trying to enforce a plastic back feed here in German Carolina and so a lot of my research has been focused on this semester has been polystyrene in North Carolina I will say I am jet lag so I may switch off between polystyrene and styrofoam I mean the same things for both of them but just from an ocean Conservancy Beach cleanup from September 2022 to March 2023 they found over 92 000 pounds of trash over 106 miles of North Carolina's coast and a Plastics accounted for 43 of all battery and debris in North Carolina polystyrene itself was 70 percent of all of that learning degree which is over 5 000 pounds which you think about polystyrene it's very light so that's a lot of polystyrene and the big issue would probably started in North Carolina is that there's no curbside recycling for it in North Carolina in fact there's only two uh Recycling Industries in North Carolina for polystyrene and it only focuses on transcription polystyrene and not the food or restaurant like containers that you have there's a lot of threats to polystyrene so the environmental threats first of all we've already talked about Justin cause choking reduced growth reduce fertility and mess up some of the juvenile development these marine species and also causes this false sense of fullness in them because it's so vital than air so it could end up causing starvation another thing is that North Carolina landfills are nearly full we're kind of keeping a place now um these big polystyrene pieces are light but they're huge and they're just taking up all the space and land some of the human health impacts polystyrene contains two known carcinogens Benzene and styrene and as it breaks down into smaller pieces and of course water systems and our soil and our food supply in the daily U.S diet consumption is about three parts per building of stern and workers that work with styrene they're finding that they're having a team of cancer of some fertility issues which is really scary and then another big problem is the climate previously the manufacturing of polystyrene is really high in CFCs which was depleted in our ozone but that was thanks for fixed but modern manufacturing of polystyrene now emits a high amount of hydrofluorocarbons or hfcs which is about 30 times more common than that CO2 and So currently these states have polystyreneogens in place so we're hoping to look at some of these things use them as a model for red Carolina to enforce the polystyrene band that we have here seeing what the best practices are um and what their research shows thankfully it's not all bad news we do have some trash trout data and some amazing people in North Carolina like the North Carolina River Keepers we're installing these uh trash tubs in urban streams and creeks and it essentially is catching the trash that's coming in through these streets these Creeks um in these streams because approximately like 75 of all the litter in these groups and streams are coming from roadside litter and so it's a great way for them to have up-to-date data on Plastics that we're seeing here and by number polystyrene was the highest item collected by these trash trucks so we're hoping to use all of this research and all of this data to persuade North Carolina to reduce their use Bostons thank you yeah thanks Christian really interesting I'm just curious now as you're you know you're getting data in the premises that if you get enough data you can convince who in North Carolina to make a change to change policy yeah not sure how much I'm allowed to save because confidentiality okay um what have you seen in other states that have these successful bands that you're trying to implement here yeah we've been seeing uh so Virginia had a very successful battle excuse Plastics so we tried to replicate a lot of what they were doing with their legislation um but one of the problems with that we hear is that their governor after passing it they're term ended and then the next Governor came in they don't care about this and kind of went away with that executive order um what we're seeing just a lot of cooperation between businesse
2023-04-13