 Hello, and good afternoon, good evening, or good morning, depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today we're pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2017 webinar series, Empowering Citizens Through Technology to Reduce Marine Plastic Pollution. My name is Rob Goodyear. I'm the managing news editor at E4C, and I'll be the moderator for today's webinar. Before we get rolling, I'd like to thank the E4C webinar series team. They host informative presentations on a monthly basis, and you can find information on upcoming webinars, as well as archived videos of past presentations on the E4C webinar's webpage, as well as our YouTube channel. Both of those URLs are listed on this slide. Please use the email address on this slide to send the team your questions, comments, and recommendations for future topics and speakers. That address is webinars at engineeringforchange.org. And if you're following us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with our hashtag E4C webinars. Before we move on to our presenters, I'd like to tell you a bit about engineering for change. E4C is a knowledge organization and global community of more than 1 million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists. We're leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture, and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news, data on hundreds of essential technologies in our Solutions Library, professional development resources, and opportunities such as jobs and fellowships. E4C members enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. The more you interact with the E4C site, the better we will be able to serve you resources aligned to your interests. For more, please see our website. It's www.engineeringforchange.org to learn more and sign up. Our next webinar is next month on May 17th. It is called Product Design Simulation and Modeling with Fusion 360. It will be presented by Andrew and Maureen at Autodesk, Sustainable Simulation Lead at Autodesk. Please see the E4C professional development page for more information and registration details. And if you're already an E4C member, we'll be sending you an invitation to the webinars directly. A few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's practice using the webinar software by telling us where you are in the world. In the chat window, which is located in the bottom right of your screen, please type your location and if you'd like where you are from. If the chat is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon in the top right corner. You can use this window to share remarks during the webinar. And if you have technical questions, just send a private chat to engineeringforchangeadmin. So go ahead and give that a try and let's see where some of you are calling from. Okay, great. Thank you. Some of them are coming in right now. I see we have people in older Colorado representing Northern Mariana Islands. Thank you for joining us. Savannah, Georgia, beautiful town. Minnesota, Newburgh, Indiana, Slovenia, Switzerland. Great. And we also have a caller saying that they can't hear audio. I have some advice for you. So let's see here. You can try turning it off and turning it back on again. That's the try and true advice for computers and it applies to these webinars also. If you have audio or visual trouble, try hitting stop and then start. And you may also try opening WebEx in a different browser. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window located below the chat to type in your questions for the presenter. And if you don't see it, click the Q&A icon in the top right corner. If you weren't aware, E4C webinars qualify engineers for one professional development hour. To request yours, please follow the instructions on the top of the E4C professional development page after the presentation. You can see that URL right here on this slide. Let's take a moment now to tell you a bit more about today's webinar. TestingOurWaters.net empowers citizen scientists to track and prevent marine plastic pollution by designing and distributing easy-to-build, inexpensive, do-it-yourself, trawls. Hang these trawls out of a bridge, boat, or shoreline and collect plastic trash in the water. You can use your haul to help identify where the trash is coming from. In this webinar, Barron Rock will introduce the project and share trawls designs and techniques for taking action to protect our oceans. Barron is a designer and educator dedicated to sustainable products, practice, and services. He's the co-founder of the award-winning Sustainable to Restore to Design from Grow Design, creator of the LA Green Drinks Network and former executive director of Sustainable Works. He now teaches courses in sustainable design at Parsons, the new school in New York City, while independently designing sustainable solutions. Welcome and thank you for joining us. Thanks, guys. I'm going to get started here. Hopefully, we'll start to share a keynote, and it looks like it is. If you can just give me a heads up and make sure I'm seeing everything. Are you guys seeing this full screen? I'm going to talk... Thanks, Rob, for joining us. I...or for inviting us, rather. You mentioned the next webinar, the Fusion 360 webinar. The products that we have designed for this project have all been done on Fusion 360. And so I teach CAD modeling, and so I'll send my students to that webinar as well. It's a great program. It's incredibly inexpensive, if not free, if you're a student or educator, and it's one of the reasons we chose it for this project. So I'm going to talk today... First, I'm going to give you context about our project, and then I'll involve making sure you understand what marine plastic pollution is. I'm going to give you a little project history, and then we'll get into the project itself and make sure that you come away feeling like you know how to build an inexpensive trawl. You know how easy it is. You'll understand the different environments in which to trawl. We'll show you how you can document your findings and what we have been doing. And then I'll show you ideas for designing your own trawls. At the end, we'll look at our next closing thoughts and next steps for this project, and I want to be sure and leave time for Q&A at the end. So just to make sure we're all on the same page, I want to start by going into the marine plastic pollution problem. So you may have heard this referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch when this first became part of our public consciousness. This is what it was referred to. It's not totally accurate. The next description given was it was a garbage island, and while there are plenty of horrific pictures like this around the world, what we're talking about is not really an island either. And in fact, it's not even really a soup, despite even though there are terrible scenes like this and there are wildlife being hindered all around the world, soup isn't quite accurate either. The best way to think of this problem is as a plastic smog. This is actually a computer model representing where the plastic has been accumulating over decades of pollution. Based on the work of five gyres, we now know that it amounts to 270,000 metric tons. This is our first estimate that came out in late December 2014, and that comprised from 5.25 trillion pieces. This is just an enormous problem in a very short period of time. You know, less than 100 years we have completely covered our oceans in plastic, including finding plastic debris and particles and fibers in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. So how did they arrive at these numbers? Well, they used a little device called a Troll, and here it is, not really in action. It's more just sort of dumped over the side of the boat. When it's in action, the boat's moving a little bit faster, but this will give you an idea. Troll comprises of, most importantly, a net. Some type of floating device, usually, although sometimes we find that weight are the better thing to apply. And then in opening and hardware to connect everything, pull it along. So it's not that complicated. One of the challenges with this issue is that the material fits just below the surface. Here's where five gyres went to establish that 270,000 metric ton. You can see they went all over the world. The name of their organization comes from the five largest swirling currents referred to as a gyre. So the five biggest gyres in the world are in the North and South Pacific, the North and South Atlantic, and the Indian Ocean. And you can see in each of the gyres, they found small, medium, large, and extra-large pieces of plastic in very large quantities. Here's what they found where I am in New York City. This was in the Hudson River. You can see the Troll in action at that point being pulled along. And here are the particles that they found in June 2015. How did we get here? Well, we have increased exponentially the amount of plastic production primarily after World War II. So we have seen a skyrocketing growth in the production of plastic in the last 50 years. And yet we see actually very, very little being recycled. This graphic comes from the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. They've done excellent work on pushing for a circular economy. And you can see very clearly that out of a massive amount of plastic production, only 2% is getting closed loop recycling of the 14% that is collected. So we have this massive amount being generated. Only 14% gets collected. We've used some for process losses. Some gets down-cycled and only a very small percentage gets closed loop recycling. We need to change that into a much more robust circular economy. As we talk about this issue, it's helpful to think of this analogy. If you saw this seed in your kitchen, you walked into your kitchen and you saw the water pouring out of the sink, this response would not be to grab a mop, it would be to shut the water off at its source. And we need to think of the plastic pollution problem this way. We've seen a lot of interesting solutions attempting to clean our oceans. But it's helpful to think back to this analogy whenever we encounter those because the plastic is entering the ocean at a garbage truck a minute. 8 million tons are added annually according to the United Nations Environment Program. So until we go and shut off the tap, until we cut off the source of the plastic, any efforts to clean our oceans are going to be misguided and missing an opportunity to really target the problem. So how does this project attempt to do that? Well, I'll give you a little background. It began when we started collaborating with five gyres. I knew them from my work at Sustainable Works in Santa Monica and I wanted to assist them with my design background. So in conversations with them, one of the things they mentioned is that they were getting calls all over the world asking for the trolls. They wanted people, academic institutions, scientists, citizen scientists were contacting them saying, can you send us a troll? Can you tell us how to build a troll? And so the project began by just doing some dimension drawings. This was actually before Fusion was around and did these drawings for them and this started the collaboration. So we began to realize that this could be a really helpful way to help disseminate the data collection. So when the opportunity arose to participate in something called a design swarm and maybe some of you have done this, it's kind of like a hackathon meets design thinking. Well, the International Design Society of America, IDSA, had a national conference called a design swarm and was chosen to participate. It was a form of a competition where each group would spend three hours generating different ideas and then you would present your idea at a very short time point. And I thought, well, if I'm going to do this, I want to do something like what the new school did for the Solar Decathlon. It was really inspired when I first started teaching at the new school by the Solar Decathlon, which maybe some of you are familiar with. It's an excellent project, maybe even some of you participated in it, where universities around the world build a house that is solar powered and they live in it for a week and demonstrate the possibilities of a solar powered home. What was great about the new school's entry is they thought not only about the competition but how to build something that would actually buy out. So while there are all these great homes that get built for the competition, they often end up sitting in a parking lot somewhere back on campus. The new school's project is now providing a home for a family outside of Washington DC. So I was really inspired by that and I thought, okay, we're going to do this design swarm. Let me bring a project that can hopefully have some lasting value. So we brought them the idea of... Well, we brought them the idea that became testing our waters when we participated in the design swarm and over the next three hours, we kind of created this idea of a project that would make it easy for citizen scientists to data collect plastic pollution. We won the competition and presented in front of the IDSA National Conference during that time. So we went from a little workshop on the side of the conference to then presenting in front of everybody. We partnered with five gyres who have done really pioneering work in this field. They're the ones who created that troll that I showed earlier. The New York New Jersey Baykeeper have been critical partners in testing our various trolls and getting us out on the water to find out how successful or not successful our different new designs are. We have received grants from the New School's Tishman Environment and Design Center and Autodesk Foundation of both the very generous in getting this project off the ground. It enabled us to bring on some great research assistants. China is an environmental policy. Graduate student in Nishwarya is a product designer that's really instrumental. What was great is most recently in Charleston, South Carolina, there was a conference called Breaking Down Plastic. We were invited to participate there and speak and troll, but what was really inspiring is that they became sort of the first proof of concept where after they let us contact us and said they were interested in building one of our trolls, we sent them dimension drawings. One of the most recent designs that we had come up with, they took those drawings, they had access to a welder at the South Carolina Aquarium with the organizer of the conference. On their site, they had a welder, so we sent them drawings for a troll but if you had access to a welder, that would be a good one to use. They took the drawings, they built the troll and you can see the results. It was successfully testing their waterways for plastic. Well, that's the good news. The bad news is that unfortunately and predictably, they found plastic. We step into our site, testingourwaters.net, one of the things that we're building out and it's really kind of a soft launch. We're still in the process of building it, but one of the things that we think will be very helpful for people to get started is to look at the troll matrix that we have created and identify various trolls that we have built or linked to and list them by price, by number of components, by our estimated build difficulty, and then what type of environment it is best suited for. And then whether or not we've seen success or failure at these different environments. So some trolls are successful in all environments. Some trolls work really well off a bridge but don't work well in a water environment. So this is a, we hope, a handy way to decide where you're going to be trolling. You want to think about, you know, is it a boat or open water? Do I, can I do it easily off a bridge or can I walk a shoreline? And then decide on how much money you're willing to spend on something like this and decide how challenging you are, what type of challenge you're up for in building the troll. So one of the first ones that we created was a hardware troll designed by Marcus Erickson. And it's made from $40 in hardware store parts. There's an air conditioning duct, a paint filter for a five gallon bucket, and then just a large plank of wood. So it works as a bridge troll, but as you can see in the bottom picture for a boat troll, it doesn't stay up above the surface the way we want it to. And as I mentioned, the plastic often sits right on the surface. So pulling this troll, you want to, if you're pulling a troll on a boat, you want to make sure that it's capturing everything that's going over the surface of the water. So here's another design that we had called a buoy troll. This one is a realization of a concept that came from the design swarm. And the idea was that it could be initially 3D printed and then mass produced. We created a section, if you were to look at a section of this, kind of like an airfoil for an airplane wing. And that actually created problems. So as you'll see, it kind of oscillates in the water. This isn't a movie, it's just an animated gift, so it's a little choppy. But instead of staying smooth on the water like we want it to, we kind of overcompensated that airfoil shape caused the troll to want to dive down into the water and then it jumps back up out of the water when the slack on the tow rope, finally it's forced to pull it up out of the water. So it's kind of like a little dolphin action there. While we're kind of fun to watch for a little bit, it doesn't provide us the data that we're looking for. So we started simplifying things. This is a picture of the Guana Canal in Brooklyn. And we said, well, let's just make it really simple. And we know that there are a lot of people that will have access to a bridge. Let's just test the pollution that's moving in and out of the canal. And so this is a really simple troll, just the rim from a five-gallon bucket with a hose clamp holding it on. You could use a rubber band and some type of weight. I mentioned that you don't always need a float. Sometimes you need a weight. In this instance, a weight is really helpful to keep the orientation of the opening facing the incoming plastic. We have a course that we have been developing these ideas even further. One of the first things we did in the course was assign the students to design a troll from IKEA parts. IKEA is globally accessible, usually very inexpensive. And we thought, you know, there might be something that they can find at IKEA that could work really well as a troll. And in fact, that's exactly what happened. This is called the frog troll for obvious reasons. Very similar to the bridge troll. This one doesn't need any tools at all, just binder clips, rope, and some form of a weight. Rob helped us with putting together a blog post that you can find on the Engineering for Change website as well. So it's a really easy way to get trawling. We have Instructables pages, and we're going to be fleshing these out more and more. We got to catch up a little bit with some of our latest developments, but right now there are four different trawls up there. The three I showed, plus one that the students called a trablee, which is using a tambourine as the opening for a trawl. So we continued to develop different concepts. The buoy trawl became the ray trawl. We wanted the trawl to stay right on the surface of the water. And so this is a concept that we see developing into a mass produced item. And we're really pleased with the way this works. Hopefully you can see that animation now, the movie capturing just how steady this trawl was at staying on the surface of the water. So we'll be continuing to develop this concept. But we were also, the last time we went out on the water, the challenge here in New York City is that we are one of many challenges that we can't go trawling 12 months out of the year. So one of the last times that we had to go trawling last fall, we said, well, let's capture some of the other ideas that we've had for various trawls. And at the last moment we decided let's weld together that concept of creating a really simple frame and using the disposable bottles, the problem. Disposable is a big source of the plastic pollution. So let's use the problem to help with the solution. Let's use those as flotation devices. Plastic as a material is wonderful. It's inexpensive, cheap, and it has incredible durability. But when you use it for a disposable item, that's when it becomes a problem. So we built this trawl, welded together the frame, and then attached, in this case, like a big jug on the sides. And we're really pleased with how well this trawl stayed on the surface as well. And so this is the trawl drawings. Our drawings of this trawl is what we sent to South Carolina Aquarium and got there, got them up and testing right away. Here's the workshop that we did last month. We used just a water taxi and had five trawls coming off of that. You can see them on the picture on the right, a number of different trawls. And I'll go into the most recent ones. So we were excited to get back under the water. We couldn't do it here in New York, but by going to that conference in South Carolina, we were able to test our latest trawl, which was taking that recycled trawl and simplifying it even more. We know that there are a lot of schools and academic institutions that have access to 3D printers. So this might not be something that somebody can do in their home, but an organization could do this easily with a 3D printer. So instead of a welded frame, the frame consists of two 3D printed parts, which are on either side of the opening. The filament for the 3D part is made from recycled bottles. So the 3D part is made from recycled bottles, and then we're using, like the recycled trawl earlier, we're using disposable beverage containers as the flotation device. And we're really pleased with how light and portable and it's compact. This trawl folds up and you can unscrew the bottles, and the whole thing gets really small. But then, as you can see, works really well. The total material cost is less than $15. So you do need access to a 3D printer, but at this point there are a number of schools that have them, and so we're looking to distribute them as soon as we make a few adjustments to the 3D file. So once you gather the material, you're going to want to process it. So every time we've gone, we've found plastic. How you then process it is important. So we're still building this part of our website out. We just put some additions on this week. There'll be more next week. There'll be more in the coming weeks as we close out the semester. So if you go to the site, it's constantly evolving and changing. But you'll see something like this under processing where you can go and look at the image, look at what you need, and then scroll down. And like the blog posts on Engineering for Change, kind of like walk you through the instructions of how to process it. First, you want to turn the net inside out. You want to let the sample dry. And then you want to use tweezers to meticulously pick the organic from the inorganic material. Take a look at it against the 5mm net. And then post what you found, a picture of what you found. We're going to be collecting that on our pollution page. So I showed you images of us trawling on the Guwanis Canal. Here's one of those expeditions, what we found in the Guwanis. And this is after just 15 minutes of trawling. This is the amount of pollution that we were collecting. Designing your own trawl is really simple. Hopefully you kind of see that the key components are, you've got to have a net. We're using a 5-gallon paint bucket filter. They're sold for about $2. You buy them in bulk if you get it for about $1.50. You can use it a couple of times, but they do rip much more easily than we would like. And so we're collecting them and then processing them and then recycling them. But it's an inexpensive way to find out how polluted your area likely is. You need some kind of frame to hold the net open. You can't just put the net in the water. You have to have something that holds it open to some type of frame. Then either floats the weight to keep the opening in the net on the surface of the water. The plastic that we're finding is the plastic that floats. A lot of the plastic that's polluting our ocean sinks, and we'll probably never get to that material. But we can use the floating plastic as a barometer for the pollution problem and to find out where is the pollution coming from. So underneath all of this, the project is how can we crowdsource the data collection and identify where the source of the pollution is coming from. The next essentials in a trawl, you've got to have something to pull it. And then there are connector pieces to hold either the net onto the frame or the rope onto the frame. So you need some type of hardware. We have a template that you can manipulate. We're just trying to make it easy to show, get people understanding that it's really easy to get started in doing this, send us drawings. We can help design the trawls along with you. If you have a design that you want to share, we would love that too. We're seeing the project as being an aggregator and collector of all kinds of interesting ideas for citizen science to get trawling and to find out just how bad the plastic pollution is in their area. Next steps for us include integrating some apps to show where you were when you found that plastic. We're tapping these various apps, whether it's Clean Swell or Literati, it's a great one. It's not really for marine pollution, but we really like the visuals and the community that they're building around that. There's a great TED Talk from Jeff Kushner, the founder of Literati that just came out this spring. Marine debris tracker was one of the earliest apps to, if not the first, to really address this issue. And importantly, they recently added the ability to track over distances, which is important for our trawling app. The Clean Swell of Literati and the South Carolina Aquarium will show you where you're picking up a piece of trash, but for our purposes, we need something that can track from point A to point B, and then we can evaluate how much trash we found in getting from A to B and make some assessments as to how polluted the waters are that way. So, instead of just picking up the piece of trash at one location, we need it to be able to track over distances. And we're working with a marine debris tracker to get that, to get our project set up. Absolutely, we want to be, you know, once you find out how polluted it is, we want to be pushing for policy change. There's a great example. By five gyres, you know, they were putting out information like the graphic in the background talking about how many microbeads were being produced. And it's an inspiring story because they went from finding microbeads in their trawls around the Great Lakes to three years later getting President Obama to sign a microbead ban. So, it was inspiring to see that they took the science and made policy change in a relatively short period of time. Next steps for us, we're going to have a more promoted launch. Like I said, this is kind of a soft launch. We're still refining the website. Here's kind of a peek behind the curtain into our website architecture. We're looking to make it really clear how you would build your own trawl designs and fleshing out the instructions on our website and on the Instructables page. Closing thoughts, I hope that you all feel that you can get started, that you can go out and try trawling wherever you have access to water, whether it's walking on the shore, dangling it over a bridge or pulling it behind a boat. Last week I tested the trawl, we're calling the Re3DP, the recycled 3D printed trawl. I tested the Re3DP trawl behind a pedal boat, or sometimes they're called a paddle boat, those boats that you just kind of leisurely cruise around a lake, and that trawl worked well even on a slow-moving boat like that. So, I hope at the end of this you feel that it's something that you can get started and doing. We would love feedback on the trawl matrix. We hope that that is a helpful tool in selecting what kind of trawl you want to build and to begin trawling, or that you understand that this is something that you can design on your own, that you just need a net, a frame to hold it open, floats or weights, something to pull it, and connections. And you can start testing the pollution levels in your area. So, we'd love to see folks get involved. I want to leave time for questions, so if any of you have them, I'd love to take the time that we have remaining for Q&A. Thank you, Barry. That was very interesting. And a great presentation. I love the videos and all the photos. There are a couple of questions that have come in for you from one of the participants. And if anyone else who's participating right now would like to ask questions, please go ahead and type them into the Q&A field. It's right under the chat field. The first question, Barron, is if there are any large ships that are trawling? The largest trawls that are happening are like the ones that I showed early in the presentation, like the Manta trawl. So that's a trawl that's been... I made several versions of that. They're usually all connected to some type of NGO, some type of nonprofit organization like Five Gyres, and they're specifically going out and doing it for that research effort. It doesn't mean that that couldn't happen in the future, but that boats that are commuting essentially could also begin doing this, and that would be a great way to get more feedback. It would take some relationship building, but it's certainly something that could happen in the future. Okay. Thank you. Another question is about where to... The person is asking if the slides that you showed will be available so they can see how to build the trawls. But I'll jump in and say that this presentation is being recorded and it will be available on our site and on YouTube, but I imagine you, Barron, have a good answer to that. I'm sure these are available on your website. Yes, you can go to testingourwaters.net because we're essentially towing a net through the water, so testingourwaters.net. And you can find the various trawls, and you saw the instructable page that we're building out. We have some of our early trawls on there and we'll be adding the most recent trawls as well to that page. So it's constantly evolving and changing, so keep coming back and looking for latest developments. Thank you. Another question, have you thought about or seen any kind of negative effect on marine life from the trawls? Occasionally, sadly, we'll see jellyfish or something in there, but what's helpful is that you're on a boat and so the fish will generally move out of the way of the boat and the plastic doesn't, and so you can collect the pollution without having, you know, really detrimental effects on the aquatic life. They move out of the way when they hear or see or feel the boat coming and the plastic just sits and floats on the surface and you can collect it. Another question, have you seen any major differences in the types and the size of plastic in different areas around the world, maybe based on currents or has it been fairly uniform? No, the currents play a big part when you have access to the slides and in the presentation, you can go back to that plastic smog image that's from Five Gyres. You can go to their site and find more, but yeah, what's happening is that the plastic is accumulating where the ocean currents swirl, and so it gets polluted into the ocean, gets brought out and broken up into sea, it's degrading but just broken from a big piece of plastic into a smaller piece of plastic, but it's still plastic and it's being ingested and it's working its way up the food chain. So plastic serves as a sponge for a lot of nasty toxic materials and so unfortunately when fish ingest it, which of course happens, it then becomes part of our food chain if we're eating fish. So it's something that the plastic is always pooling in those currents. Most recently, last week I think, there was an article that talked about how the plastic, after kind of swirling around in various currents, is then being kind of dumped into the poles, into the Arctic area. So now they're seeing plastic from nowhere near where they're finding it in the Arctic Circle, they're finding plastic accumulating there. So the hypothesis is that it's being sort of swirling around and then dumped into the north or south pole where they're finding it, accumulate, where there's no source anywhere near where it could have been coming from. So they're hypothesizing that the plastic is actually being dumped from those five gyres into the poles. Question about your work. This person would like to know, this person said that they were expecting more of a focus on reducing the pollution problem instead of hearing about measuring it. And you addressed why it's important to measure it in the beginning of your presentation and I'm sure when you're explaining your work to people, this is one of the things that people might ask about. What do you say when people ask you about reducing it instead of measuring it? Well, we're measuring it in order to be able to cut it off at its source. Efforts to clean it are just going to be exercises and futility at this point because it's entering at such a huge and rapid rate. It's a garbage truck a minute or 8 million tons annually. So we've got to cut off the use of disposables. We've got to prevent it from entering our waterways in the storm drain system. So big picture we need to dispose of disposables. The convenience factor gave us a short-term benefit but now we're seeing the long-term repercussions of that disposable mentality, that disposable society. So we need to move away entirely from disposables which is sort of a linear thinking approach and move to a circular economy approach because we've got one planet and you cannot run a linear system on a finite planet indefinitely. We've done it for a short period of time but now we're seeing the feedback. Our project tries to make visible the plastic that's already out there because since you can't see it you can look out over the water and see this beautiful blue-green ocean and think that it's a healthy ecosystem and in reality whether it's the ocean or the rivers or the lake there's plastic sitting just beneath the surface that has been building there. So we're trying to illuminate that problem and then hopefully use once the project is up and running full force use the ability to crowdsource the data collection to identify where is it coming from, where is the plastic entering our oceans and prevent those symbolic, you know, the analogy to the dump trucks. We've got to prevent those dump trucks from entering or back to the analogy in my presentation to turn off the faucet, we have to shut off the tap. Yeah, I thought that one dump truck every minute was a powerful image. It's a powerful way to express that number. Yeah, I mean, I get it. It's like, oh, we have a mess, let's clean it up but we have to understand the rate at which the plastic is entering our ocean. We're not going to be able to keep up. We need to cut it off at its source. Another question, and I'm also just going to tack on one of my own to this. What activities are you involved in trying to persuade people to take part and do this trawling themselves? I guess that's besides present in E4C webinar. And my own question is how has that been going so far? How much participation do you have and what's your goal? Yeah, that's really kind of the next phase is to have a promoted launch. We have, as you know, Five Jars is one of our partners and we have connected with their ambassador here in New York. They have global ambassadors. And so we're going to arrange different events that will allow interested public citizen scientists to engage. So that's kind of the next step once we kind of fine tune our website is we'll have an event, you know, also right now we can't get on the water. Nobody's out on the water just yet, although we do have some warm days. Once the weather breaks here in New York, we're going to be having different events and we'll promote those on our new Facebook page but we'll also share with our partners who have a more established following with New York New Jersey Baykeeper and Five Jars to help us tap into their engaged citizens to show them that, you know, this is a way for you to get involved. Okay, great. Another question is whether this type of equipment, if you ever considered whether it could be sold to volunteer organizations to help get them involved? Yeah, you know, we saw the, eventually what we're going to be doing is having those, like the re3D pre-trial, the one that's from recycled materials. We'll have that as a downloadable file and we'll have the links to how you can order all of the roads and the nets and the hardware. So it'll be really easy for you to just click and build these components yourself. We also are going to be establishing a presence on Public Lab, which is a great citizen science portal for all kinds of projects like ours. So Public Lab is sort of an aggregator of environmental, citizen science, data collection projects, and one of the members of Public Lab I teach a sustainable systems class with and so we, you know, we made the connection recently on a boat for the class and realized, hey, this is a great fit. So they'll eventually will have a kit available so you can just order a trawl and make it that much easier for say a non-profit or a school to just get started. But that'll be on the intermediate future in the short term. We'll have the file and links to where you can order the parts yourself up available shortly so you can build this on your own and get testing right away. Great. I have another question for you if you don't mind. I was wondering if just based on the data that you've collected so far, are you, is there enough right now that you're able to see any kind of trend in the type of plastic or the source to be able to make any statements about where it might be coming from? Not yet. No. We'd love to do that but, you know, we don't have enough data to be able to make those determinations. Eventually we will. You know, right now we're still kind of testing the trawls and, you know, making sure they collect the material and do it easily and get as inexpensive as possible for anyone that wants to do it, whether it's an individual or a group. So once we get all those things out, then we'll start to be able to develop some trends and then, you know, identify where the sources are. One of the things that's kind of interesting on that issue is when they started trawling globally, they had some estimates in mind and when they came out with that number, it was actually lower than what they thought it would be. So even though that number is so huge, it was actually smaller than what they thought it would be and the hypothesis is that it's being ingested. So there are some particle sizes of plastic that match up with organisms on the food chain really closely and they were missing that size. And the thinking is that, you know, fish were eating that size plastic. Thinking it was a meal. And so as part of the study, they think that might be why the numbers might be a little bit lower because of the ingestion of plastic into these materials. It's become routine now. Not just, you know, we've seen the work from Chris Jordan and the atrocity going on at the Midway Atoll with the Laysana Habatros because the way they feed is almost identical to the way a trawl collects the floating plastic. So they're scooping up hoping to get fish and they're scooping up plastic and then killing their young and ingesting it when they regurgitate the food into their mouths. So we've seen that, but now it's also become routine to see whales and other large sea creatures that are ingesting such massive amounts of plastic that they perish because of the pollution and the plastic pollution in their digestive system. Sadly, we're going to see more and more of that. Well, that's sad. Is there anything you can say on the last note to pick up our stairs? Well, we created this problem, so it's not inevitable, you know, which means that we can also solve it. And the issue is, you know, sometimes we see these numbers and we're like, oh, you know, sometimes the response might need to shrug your shoulders and despair, but it's helpful to remember that if we created this problem, then we can solve it. We can design circular economy business models. We can get rid of the notion of disposable packaging, which isn't really disposable. It just, you know, creates a problem somewhere else. So knowing that this problem is not something, you know, inevitable that we have to live with, but something that we can solve, I think, is helpful in addressing it. But if we don't know it exists, then we're not going to do anything. And so our efforts are partly to illuminate the issue of this pollution that's sitting just beneath the surface to hopefully motivate more and more people to do something positive to fight it. Great. Thank you so much. And thanks again for taking the time to present your work. It's been very interesting. And I hope that the people listening take the time to check out your site, maybe get involved with trawling yourselves. And thank you all for attending. If you're after a professional development hour, you can see the code on the screen right here. And if you have questions, please email us at the email address on the screen. And don't forget to become an E4C member, and we'll send you more information on our upcoming webinars. Thank you very much. Thanks, guys.