 Hi, thank you very much. My name is Chris Pringle and I'm going to talk today about a little citizen science project that we've been doing, which is looking at measuring microplastics in the home. So I think we all, I think we all know that when we launder our clothes, when we put them in the washing machine, the action of clothes moving around in the water releases microfibres, and those microfibres go into the wastewater, and this is the source of microfibres to the environment. And that's relatively well understood and relatively well characterised. But what's less well known is that as we use the textiles in our home as we wear our clothes, just the action friction that we create when we were using the textiles actually creates microfibres as well. And these microfibres tend to pass into the air, so they pass into the air into the room around us, into the air into our homes. And it's much, much harder to characterise this release. It's really hard to understand the rate of release, and there's been very few measurements in terms of how many microfibres are released, and what types of microfibres are really split. Two thirds of the textiles in our home contain plastic to make respect some fraction of these fibres to be microplastics, but we know very little about it. And so this is a picture from an illustration which is taken from a, which we made from a paper by Defalco et al. And so they did some studies in the clean lab, and they estimated that the release of microfibres from clothing is actually similar to the rate of release that you get when you wash them. So it's potentially a really important source of microfibres. Unfortunately there's been very few measurements, and one of the reasons there's been very few measurements is it's quite hard to measure within the whole environment. We're all as environmental scientists, we're used to kind of going out to the field, we can set up our instruments, but actually we need to measure within people's homes and they need to be, you can't just get an empty home, it needs to be home where people are living in, because how we use our homes affects the number of microfibres for them. And for that reason, it actually means that we need to go and kind of get permission of the people living in the home and set up our experiments there. So citizen science is a really attractive way of doing that because you can work with people that are living in the houses, and then you can engage them and then you can create an experiment where you're actually able to, you have the permission to work within other people's homes. So what we've done, what I present here today is data from a pilot version of the homes under the microscope. So we did a pilot project and then we did the main project, the main project is being analysed at the moment. With the pilot project what we did is we deliberately engaged people that we thought would be really engaged in the project. So we went to people that we thought either had quite confident scientifically, or were quite interested in microplastics. So in terms of bias, our population, our participants are slightly biased towards fairly well educated and quite engaged within the scientific process, but it wasn't a particularly easy study that we were asking them to do. So that's why we went for more engaged participants. No, excuse me, we recruited 40 participants across Bristol, 32 of them got into the project, so we've got data from 32, which is a decent fraction of respondents. We gave them eight sample dishes, and we said please put two sample dishes per room in any of any four rooms of your house. We left it up to them which rooms they measured in. We also gave them four microscopes to test, and then we tested an automatic fibre counting tool. So the sample dish that we have here is really simple, it's really cheap as well, which is handy. It's simply a Petri dish with some forensic tape stuck to it, so forensic tape is what the CSI guys used to pick up fingerprints. So it's just sticky tape basically. We put some some letters on the grid, we printed some letters on it, and that's so we can know where we've got microscope image we can tell where exactly on the grid that is, otherwise it's really hard to identify where the fibres are. So we gave them, we gave them each eight sample dishes, and asked them to put them around their house. And so this is the kind of very first look at our data. And we've got a spread of data, this is all the data, all the participants, all the sample dishes, and our average concentration, our average deposition rate of like the fibres is about 1,900 fibres per meter squared per day. So it's quite significant, if you think just in a meter square or a day, it's quite a lot of fibres kind of coming down in the background. There's not very many other studies, so it's reassured to know that we're within the range of the studies that do exist, which is good because we've never really tested this selection technique before. It's very simple, but there's always potential problems with the new collection tape, but it seems to be working, it seems to be getting data in the range of other observations. You can also see there's quite a big range of concentrations, we've got a lot on the lower end and a few kind of up to higher ends. So one thing that we were interested in is we wanted to know what the range is between people's homes. So just some people live in a home with lots of microfibres and other people live in a home with very few or is all quite similar. We have a feeling that we expect people's behavior in the home to affect the number of microfibres, how often you open the windows, you've got lots of carpets, you've got lots of soft furnishings. These things might affect the range of the microfiber concentration in the home. We don't really know. So what this plot here shows, so this is data from each participant. So one box of whisker is kind of across the eight samples that are participants provided. I've just arranged it in decreasing order of concentration just so you can kind of see the range. And what we find is we do have quite a lot of homes, we've got generally quite low microfiber concentration, relatively low range of concentrations. And then obviously we've got some so much higher. So it's a relatively high. I think I was expecting less difference between different homes. So we do have some homes, we've got relatively high microfiber concentrations over here. Looking into this a little bit more. What we tend to find is within those homes is actually one or two rooms within the home that have a high microfiber concentrations pulling the average up. So it's not like their entire home is very full of microfibres. We think it's possible they've got one or two rooms that have a higher microfiber concentration. So that brings me on to the next thing that we looked at. So we asked people in retrospect, we should maybe have said, please put one in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, whatever. But we just said, you know, this is your home. What do you want to find out because we wanted it to be about kind of participant led. So people put it in four different rooms in their home. I mean, most of us got better than the bathroom really, hasn't they? Kitchen living room. And then there was some other things like office study. There was a big other column here because some people put it in like, I don't know, conservatory or the sewing room or something. We didn't really anticipate the range of different rooms that people would have in their house. But what we find from the date is the bedroom in the bathroom are by quite a long way, the rooms that we find the highest microfiber concentration, which is maybe quite not that surprising, I guess, because you have a lot of furniture in the bathroom. You've got a lot of tiles, which, you know, when you're using and create microfibres, I'm surprised they're living here as relatives, they know. I think it depends a little bit on how often people are in these rooms and how often they're using them. So that's something you can potentially dig into in the future. So what we asked people to do, we wanted people to have the experience of like, you know, as a researcher, you look at your data and you have that kind of finding out what you've what you've discovered, you know, actually really being able to examine your data. So we wanted to find a way of giving our participants that experience. So we didn't want them to just measure and post it back to us for us to look in the lab. So what we did is we worked with Mark Hansen at the University of West England, and he developed an image processing tool to count the number of microfibres. So what the participants did is they took photos using a microscope, and then they uploaded it to the website, and he's got this little kind of image processing tool, which tries to count the number of microfibres. Just really exciting for us because we normally count them by hand, which takes quite a long time. It's not perfect. Look at that. It's definitely shows some promise. This is a reason the good one with some which are some images which are worth. So you can see that sometimes the engine tools picking up the letters on the grid switch is something we can create for this is a thread over here which is totally missing completely. What it does do is this one, this one here, it often splits so it takes one fiber and it sees it's two separate fibers so especially when it's very curved it's really struggling with that. But then this is our, this is our pilot project so the idea is that we can use this data to train the imaging tools who have improved recognition in the future. We're also learning that when you ask people to take a photograph or something you get a whole range of different answers we did say you know please put it to the letter so they're you know the right way up and people, although they were really engaged and they gave really good feedback. So what we've had to do is we've had to recreate a lot of the photos in the lab but with the technician going through and they're much higher quality photos, so that gives us a lot more information. So that's kind of something that we're learning in the future. A project which has got relatively cheap kind of collection tools and then if we can get an automated counting thing to work really well then we can quickly scale this project up really nicely, and so we can count a number of fibers quite easily. But where we fall down is we want to characterize the micro fibers we want to know what the composition is. Everybody's interested in micro plastics. We're interested in both micro plastics and micro fibers, but in terms of engaging when you ask people people want to know what fractions plastic they want to know how many micro plastics are in the air. The way that we've done this so far is using a ramen. So I don't know this but if you, if you, if you're a forensic background you can look down a microscope and you can actually tell from looking at the fiber with a degree of confidence what it is. So what we did is we first got someone who knows what they're doing to look at it and say you know we think this is cotton we think this is polyester. And then what we did is we ran some of those through the ram spectra, but this is quite expensive and it's very, very slow. And it takes homes is not a big project. It takes quite a lot of lab time to do this. This is a very, very provisional result. I suspect the result from the main will be smaller than this. But at the moment from what we've characterized from the pilot we're finding about 40% of the micro fibers in the sample are micro plastics, mostly polyester. And it's in a lot of clothes and a lot of the fibers that we use a lot fabrics that we use within our home. So this is something that is really the sticking point if you like of our project you want to be able to scale it up so we want to be able to do more homes more studies and we've got data from just over 30 minutes. It's really exciting, but you can imagine you'd want to scale that to a much, much larger project and really what's slowing this down is how we characterize the fibers recently. So just to kind of say that this is our next step so this was the pilot project the main project is being analyzed at the moment. And we have also got a little bit of funding to develop materials for schools. It's quite a fun project. It's something that you could run in schools quite easily. So we've got private school Bradford here kindly do some measurements for us at the moment. And so they're going to give us feedback in terms of what the kids think what they're interested in. We're developing some schools materials to go with that. It would be really nice if we could get the automatic counting tool to work really well because I think it's a really nice example of what kind of image processing to do how can answer some of the society questions. I've not talked about it but we did an absolute ton of evaluation. We wanted to know why our participants took part in what the barriers were the main barrier was times. It was a big project was a lot that we asked of them. But I think it's really important to value, especially if you're doing citizen times what people to have a positive experience in the project. You want them to go away and tell their friends that they took part. It was fun. It was interesting and that they learned something they don't leave feeling taken advantage of in any way top. So that's something that we're really focusing on in terms of making sure that our participants are engaged stay engaged and are kind of happy with the process. And then the final question which we're mulling over and we don't really know what to do about is how we characterise the fibrous more easily but would be really nice to find some way of looking at the image and say that's polyester that would scale up what we can do hugely and very, very quick. But it's not something I know how to do yet. That's great. Thank you.