Welcome to the Deep Plastic Initiative – an organization dedicated to promoting education and awareness regarding the global dangers of plastic pollution, especially in the ocean environment.
Deep Plastic is co-founded by Anna Du, one of the top winning female middle school science fair participants in recent years. Her project, and her passion, is about helping to save the world from microplastics – a microscopic form of plastic pollution that is rapidly spreading through the oceans, and throughout our entire food chain.
While news of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other gyre-based accumulation of floating macroplastics has been major news in recent decades, it turns out the degradation of these plastics makes the pollution problem even worse. In fact the biggest problem is quite small – as plastics break down into smaller and smaller microplastics, their cumulative surface areas increase, and they have the potential to bind with other chemicals and become even more toxic. We hope to work together to stop this cycle from happening!
While Anna is focused on the science and engineering aspects of identifying and cleaning up microplastics directly, there are many other things that can and should be done to clean up plastic pollution both on the land and in the sea. In addition, we hope to work together to discover and promote new ways to enhance the efficiency of plastic recycling, in particular single-stream recycling, at homes, schools, companies and other places. Not to mention, it is our goal to prevent single-use plastic pollution in the first place.
Deep Plastic was founded with the idea that we can all contribute something to help solving this world problem. No matter what age you are, or your background, there’s a way that you too can help out – whether it’s volunteering to spread the word, cleaning up a beach or park, conducting some citizen science projects, finding ways to design cleanup projects at home or at school, contributing to fundamental science/engineering research in this field and more!
