This week on Ours to Protect we meet students from Mercy Mounthawk in Tralee who've built a remote controlled catamaran that removes large surface plastics and harmful microplastics from the ocean.
Plastic is hugely popular because it's cheap, durable and versatile but plastic fragments - called microplastics have become a pervasive global contaminant found in every ecosystem and the human body.
Microplastics are in the water we drink, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, and the air we breathe.
They are very small particles of plastic that are shed from products we use every day - from plastic bottles, food wrapping, synthetic clothing, to the tyres on our cars.
They’ve pervaded every ecosystem in the world and they’ve infiltrated the human body, they've been found in everything from our bones to our blood to our brains which has serious health implications.
Students at Mercy Mounthawk Secondary School in Tralee saw the extent of the issue at beach clean ups they did in the Maharees and at Cockleshell beach.
TY students Fran Hanafin and Cullen Dowling want to raise awareness about the problem of microplastics.
Alan Balfe is education and wildlife office at Tralee Bay wetlands. He agrees with the students that microplastics are a major problem that many of us are not aware of.
A group of students from Mercy Mounthawk came together last year and developed a 3D printed, remote controlled catamaran capable of removing both large surface plastics and microplastics from Tralee Bay.
Their project called Ocean Devotion won the junior water category at this year’s ECO-UNESCO Young Environmentalist Awards (YEA).
Cullen and Fran explain how the catamaran works.
Their teacher Sadhbh Brosnan, who teaches science and coding, praised the works the students put into the project.
So what can we do to minimise our exposure to microplastics? Alan Balfe believes Kerry can lead the way on single use plastics. The cafe at Tralee Bay Wetlands cafe no longer uses plastic and he points to similar developments in Kiillarney and Dingle.
