Hello and welcome to our latest team update. We have been incredibly busy in the last few months and share a snapshot of our activities with you below:
In mid-June, Dr Ben Williams gave a talk to the West Bristol Climate Action group as part of Clean Air Day. The event focused on how people feel about the air quality in Bristol and Ben spoke about the Homes Under the Microscope project that brings professional and citizen scientists together to develop a new and accessible way to collect microplastics in the home. The measurement of microplastics in our homes will help us understand the role we play in the generation of microplastics and their potential to impact the biosphere when released.
The team took part in the 20th anniversary of the Festival of Nature’s family weekend and devised an activity where children could look at microplastics down the microscope, and then could draw what they thought microplastics looked like. See below pictures:
As previously highlighted in our blog, we welcomed Alex King to the team as a PhD student. Alex’s PhD aims to create a large, harmonised database of characterised airborne microplastics with comparative validation using a nationwide citizen science laboratory and field study and Welsh air quality monitoring systems to provide policy recommendations for key stakeholders. The PhD is partly funded by the Welsh government, so Alex’s hope is that her PhD can be highly influential in reducing airborne microplastics and improving air quality.
Ben also gave a Keynote speech on airborne microplastics, co-creation and citizen science at the PlasticsFuture 2023 Conference hosted by the University of Portsmouth last month. The conference bought together a wide range of stakeholders including researchers, community organisations, NGOs, industry, policymakers and practitioners from around the world to explore how sustainable transitions to halt the negative impacts of plastics can be catalysed.
We have also recently recruited two interns to work with us on Microplastics. We are also about to host our final Biospheric Microplastics Research cluster workshop.