Neil Blake weighs a paper bag of fake grass fragments he has collected from a stormwater gutter near Darebin Creek in Melbourne’s north.
Over the past three years Blake has conducted 56 collections of synthetic turf in the waterway alongside the KP Hardiman Reserve hockey pitch.
“I noticed that a local hockey pitch was being replaced and the plastic surface was running off into the local environment,” he says. Strong northerly winds and leaf blowers had helped shed the turf fragments into the local environment.
In addition to impacts on aquatic ecosystems, scientific analysis suggests plastic pollution is exacerbating climate change, biodiversity loss and ocean acidification.
Australians produce more than 3m tonnes of plastic waste each year, and according to Clean Up’s annual survey of parks, beaches, creeks and other public spaces, plastics make up more than 80% of litter across the country. A review by the New South Wales chief scientist found that one synthetic turf field could transport between 10kg and 100kg of plastic fragments into the stormwater system or local waterways.
Blake has taken advantage of the electronic scales provided by the newly opened community science laboratory in the Port Phillip EcoCentre in St Kilda, to quantify his samples to present to the local council and the Environment Protection Authority. The lab hosts facilities including microscopes, measuring equipment, safety gear and access to advice from trained scientists.
It’s one example of citizen scientists tackling the growing problem of plastics in waterways, including beaches, rivers and dive sites around the country.
‘Extremely confronting’
On the other end of the country at Australia Bay, a remote Arnhem Land beach approximately 550km north-east of Darwin, a team headed by Sea Shepherd Australia recently worked with local Gumurr Marthakal Indigenous rangers to conduct a beach clean-up.
Australia Bay, in the outer Wessel Islands, is a culturally significant turtle nesting area heavily impacted by plastic pollution and abandoned fishing gear known as ghost nets.
Graham Lloyd, a remote marine debris campaigner for Sea Shepherd Australia, says it was “extremely confronting”, especially for the Indigenous rangers, to walk on to a beach that took two days to get to and witness the worst levels of plastic pollution he’d ever seen.
“This beach was covered in decades of plastic, and we find everything from ghost gear … medical waste such as … blood bags to bottles of urine to toilet seats and every form of single-use plastic in between.”
Lloyd says his team provides data to the CSIRO from such beach clean ups in some of the most remote locations in Australia. They use a standardised process called a coastal transect survey, a scientific method used for monitoring plastic pollution and water quality.
The beach cleans are a form of “direct action citizen science” that assists in research and beach management, he says.
Jeff Angel, director of the Total Environment Centre, says projects like these demonstrate how citizen science is stepping in where government and industry regulations have failed to curtail the growing problems associated with plastic pollution impacting Australia’s natural environments.
“When REDcycle collapsed, we were only retrieving a few per cent of the total consumption of soft plastics and since then we have gone further backwards,” he says.
“Plastic pollution has been occurring for decades in Australia from many sources – literally millions of tonnes of large items that break up and … create smaller microplastics that are still in the environment. It’s one of our biggest pollution problems that needs to be addressed by multiple strategies from the global plastic treaty to national to local action.”
Angel says citizen science demonstrates both a measure of individual concern and a commitment to collective action to get on the path to solutions. “It educates the individual directly and by citizen scientists interacting with their own social networks, to reduce their own plastic footprint.”
How to join your local clean-up crew
Nationally, one of the largest projects tackling plastic pollution is the Australian Microplastics Assessment Project (Ausmap), which has engaged more than 10,000 people in citizen science and collected more than 1,200 samples nationally, highlighting more than 60 nationwide hotspots. Anyone can also register to join Clean Up Australia day on 1 March.
For an Australia-wide map of other citizen science projects, the Australian Citizen Science Association’s project finder offers a tool to identify local opportunities, while another program involving waterways is the Australian Conservation Foundation’s platypus project.
April Seymore, executive officer of the Port Phillip EcoCentre, says being able to access trained scientists and feel part of a community of concern is vital, noting that the centre’s community science lab is one of the first globally. The lab is currently running a series of sessions for people seeking advice or simply curious about plastic contamination or their local environs.
“In this era where there’s a lack of trust in institutions, it’s refreshing to have a place where you can investigate in the real world with real people. This can help turn anecdotes to evidence – but we want people to have fun too,” Seymore says.
