It is incumbent upon teachers to reach out to students through methods that capitalize on the students' own motivations. Because of the diversity of self-referential personal styles of learning, reaching every student with a cookie-cutter approach to teaching is nearly impossible. This report explores the application of a type of problem-based learning known as "Legacy Cycles" that apply web technology to answer challenges presented as scenarios. The scenarios give students a similar experience to scientists pursuing investigation and research. Students then search for answers to questions, learn more about the processes being taught with hands-on activities, and prepare a product to demonstrate mastery of the content. In this example of the Legacy Cycle, three challenges are used to teach concepts of density, ocean currents and plastic pollution. / text

Plasticozoic excavates humanity’s relationship to nature and to ourselves through plastic artifacts of consumer culture, which were recovered from oceans and beaches by the artist, or sent to her from around the world. Through created specimens and collected fragments of the Anthropocene, it considers the precariousness of our place in time, where misperceptions of reality and the collective impact of our every day lives can have global effects. "Future geologists will be able to precisely mark our era as the Plasticozoic, the place in the sands of time in which bits of plastic first appeared." -Oceanographer A. Sylvia Earle, The World is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean's Are One

abstract: Plastic pollution has become a global threat to ecosystems worldwide, with microplastics now representing contaminants reported to occur in ambient air, fresh water, seawater, soils, fauna and people. Over time, larger macro-plastics are subject to weathering and fragmentation, resulting in smaller particles, termed ‘microplastics’ (measuring < 5 mm in diameter), which have been found to pollute virtually every marine and terrestrial ecosystem on the planet. This thesis explored the transfer of plastic pollutants from consumer products into the built water environment and ultimately into global aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. A literature review demonstrated that municipal sewage sludge produced by wastewater treatment plants around the world contains detectable quantities of microplastics. Application of sewage sludge on land was shown to represent a mechanism for transfer of microplastics from wastewater into terrestrial environments, with some countries reporting as high as 113 ± 57 microplastic particles per gram of dry sludge. To address the notable shortcoming of inconsistent reporting practices for microplastic pollution, this thesis introduced a novel, online calculator that converts the number of plastic particles into the unambiguous metric of mass, thereby making global studies on microplastic pollution directly comparable. This thesis concludes with an investigation of a previously unexplored and more personal source of plastic pollution, namely the disposal of single-use contact lenses and an assessment of the magnitude of this emerging source of environmental pollution. Using an online survey aimed at quantifying trends with the disposal of lenses in the US, it was discovered that 20 ± 0.8% of contact lens wearers flushed their used lenses down the drain, amounting to 44,000 ± 1,700 kg y-1 of lens dry mass discharged into US wastewater. From the results it is concluded that conventional and medical microplastics represent a significant global source of pollution and a long-term threat to ecosystems around the world. Recommendations are provided on how to limit the entry of medical microplastics into the built water environment to limit damage to ecosystems worldwide. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Biology 2020

This report is about an innovative project on the sustainable design of disposable products triggered by critical thinking related to the environmental protection and use of paper-based disposable products.   The project is set against the backdrop of the UN End-plastic-pollution initiative, in the 21st century when plastic waste is proliferating and microplastics spread across the planet's ecosystems are already causing a serious environmental crisis. With a focus on disposable products, the project investigates and analyses the sustainability and experience of using paper-based disposable products as an alternative to plastic.   The authors argue that neither disposable products nor plastics are responsible for the current environmental crisis, but rather that the main problem lies in the leakage of disposable products through their life cycle, which is mainly related to consumer behaviour and life cycle management.   The study proposes a systemic innovation that combines enhanced lifecycle management through emerging technologies and a subscription service model for disposable products with user-centred principles. The innovation includes lifecycle maps, user journey maps and user interfaces as visual outcomes.   Finally, an assessment of the potential risks of the systemic innovative solution and a summary and reflection of the overall project are presented.

In the Saudi Arabian Red Sea, two of the seven species of sea turtles are known to nest and forage along the coast, the hawksbill turtle (Eretmochelys imbricata) and the green turtle (Chelonia mydas). As a result of some life history characteristics, sea turtles are particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic impacts. Under Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and the recent opening of its borders to recreational tourists, the country aims to develop several large-scale projects along the Red Sea coast, locally known as “giga-projects”. Thus, imminent pressures from coastal development highlight the urgency needed for multi-country cooperation in protecting sea turtles in the region. This dissertation aims to establish some baseline data and protocols for future work to meet the data needs of the relevant conservation authorities in Saudi Arabia. In particular, this thesis contributes new and important information to some of the identified knowledge gaps for the Red Sea region, including sea turtle habitat use, threat assessment (plastic and heavy metal pollution), and evaluating hatching success. I used satellite telemetry to understand foraging home ranges of hawksbill and green turtles, post-nesting migrations, and inter-nesting habitat use of green turtles. Additionally, I used photo identification to understand the abundance and behavior of turtles at a Rabigh fringing reef, in the central Red Sea. I assessed two anthropogenic contaminants as a threat to Red Sea turtles: heavy metal contamination and plastic ingestion. Heavy metal concentrations in the sand were evaluated at the largest green turtle rookery in Saudi Arabia, Ras Baridi, which is located next to a cement factory. I also assessed the concentration of heavy metals in the tissues of dead hatchlings found at Ras Baridi. Additionally, I studied plastic ingestion in ten deceased turtles found along the Saudi Arabian Red Sea. In my last data chapter, I assessed the hatching success of green turtle nests, and investigated clutch relocation as a possible method of increasing success. The final chapter summarizes the results from this research in the context of the 2004 PERSGA Marine Turtle Conservation Plan, and provides possible conservation strategy recommendations to protect Red Sea turtles

Plastic pollution is unavoidable in the natural environment. Consequences of plastic ingestion include exposure to environmental pollutants and toxin accumulation, causing endocrine disruption, inflammatory and physiological stress in organisms. Microplastics have been shown to transfer across food webs, however, limited studies have examined microplastic accumulation across terrestrial food webs. Furthermore, few studies have examined plastic pollution in apex predatory animals. A study was conducted to quantify the abundance of plastic pollution in the gastrointestinal tract in birds of prey. Two species were investigated, one which forages in terrestrial habitats and one which forages in aquatic environments including Buteo lineatus (red-shouldered hawk) and Pandion haliaetus (osprey), respectively. The gastrointestinal tract was necropsied, chemically digested, and examined for microplastic prevalence. Overall, microplastics are significantly more abundant per gram of gastrointestinal (GI) tract tissue in species that forage on small rodents and terrestrial reptiles (B. lineatus) as compared to species that forage on fish and aquatic invertebrates (P. haliaetus). Buteo lineatus averaged 0.81 (±0.15) fibers and 0.14 (±0.04) fragments per gram of GI tract tissue while P. halieatus averaged 0.31 (±0.09) fibers and 0.04 (±0.02) fragments per gram of GI tract tissue. There was a significant interaction between type and color in both B. lineatus and P. haliaetus GI tract tissues. Micro-Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (μ-FTIR) was run on haphazardly selected samples and found that rayon was the most common polymer identified in both species. The significant difference found between species could be indicative that terrestrial raptors may experience greater bioaccumulation than aquatic species foraging at comparable trophic levels. However, the significant interaction between type and color in both species indicates a potential common source of pollution that affects both environments. Further investigation on the source of polymers is necessary in order to develop conservation and management strategies aimed at decreasing the output of synthetic fibers into the environment. Due to the abundance of polymers found in these species, understanding the potential biological and physiological effects of plastics is essential to informing superior management strategies that can better protect and preserve wildlife from increasing anthropogenic pressures.

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This study aims to detect how many microplastics and what kind are released from the wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) Skebäck, in Örebro. The study was limited to the analysis of three filters with 50 μm mesh size and one filter with 300 μm mesh size. The samples were taken at different times, two in the fall of 2019 and one in the spring of 2020. Visual characterization was used for the quantification of microplastics, and a lower and upper bound was used. The lower bound represents particles that were deemed identifiable as plastic with high certainty, while the upper bound also includes particles that may have been microplastic. An additional ATR-FTIR analysis was performed on selected microplastics &gt;300 μm.  The presence of microplastics in the effluent from Skebäcks WWTP could be confirmed. The quantity of microplastics per m​3​ (MP/m​3​) trapped on the 50 μm filters were quantified in a range between 0 MP/m​3​ to 291 MP/m​3​ for the lower bound, and 72 MP/m​3​ to 435 MP/m​3​ for the upper bound. The 300 μm filter had considerably less microplastics than the 50 μm filter with 1.8 MP/m​3​. The quantification of fibers on the 50 μm filter and 300 μm filters was not possible due to high blank contaminations. According to the concentration of 63 MP/m​3​ of the lower bound count on the 50 μm filters and the amount of water flowing through Skebäck in 2019, 17 818 935 m​3​, 1.1 billion microplastic particles were released into Svartån that year. In comparison the highest value of the upper bound count, 435 MP/m​3​, gave a release of 7.7 billion microplastic particles. Using the concentration of the 300 μm filter 1.8 MP/m​3​, 32 million microplastics/year were released from Skebäck in 2019. The amount of spheres 50-300 μm released in the effluent from Skebäck was estimated to be 3.7 kg in 2019.

This thesis project is exploring and investigates the applications of different methods of reward and nudging strategies and their potential effect on motivating and directing people’s behavior to be more engaged in recycling as a social movement within the society of Saudi Arabia. By creating sustainable behaviors, we contribute to the solutions and help minimize the potential damage of plastic pollution. The designs created throughout this thesis as prototypes of different concepts test the effectiveness of the different strategies on the behaviors of the population in Saudi Arabia. The main findings demonstrated that for people to steer their behavior toward recycling, they need to be financially rewarded. Testing other nudging strategies showed that these strategies might not be as powerful as the traditional system of reward and punishment. Therefore, this project needs to be further investigated and iterated in cooperation with other stakeholders and designers from different fields.