Name of the people from Belgium that assisted the project during the mobility in Vila-real (Spain):

John Seghers (JRC)

Håkan emteborg (JRC)

Emmy Pequeur (UGhent)

Pieter Van Heetvelde (Thomas More)

Tuur Heylen (Thomas More)

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Information on the mobility in Spain

ASE launched a pilot project called Erasmus Maris,  RAISing Education through Citizen Science by a Pedagogical Sailboat project. As the project "Environmental pollution research at school" aansloot bij de doelstellingen, ASE shared the experience gained within the project.

 

Scope

The general objective of the Erasmus Maris initiative is to create tangible and lasting links between research institutions and upper secondary schools within co-created citizen science projects related to marine environment issues. The sailboat is used as a motivation factor for the pupils and a tool to acquire technical and transversal skills such as leadership and teamwork.

 

Within this initiative the consortium developed protocols to assess microplastic pollution that can be implemented in secondary schools’ chemistry labs.

The Joint Centre of the European Commission (JRC) prepared dedicated microplastics reference materials tailored to meet the characteristics and size of microplastics that can be assessed by secondary school. The main goal here is to tackle the concerns that are still raised by scientists regarding quality of obtained data and results within citizen science campaigns. Namely, the reference material is used to run in-house method validation according to international standards and ensure that all measurement results are robust and demonstrate the traceability.

 

Share of best practices within the mobility in Spain:

During the mobility, the pupils were supervised by scientists from the University of Ghent, the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission and the technological University Thomas More.

 

Scientific work onboard the sailboat

Sampling of microplastics on the sea surface

The learners learned to follow a protocol to collect microplastics on the sea surface using a sampling apparatus (manta net) that was constructed by Belgian secondary school pupils from vocational education. They learned how to use sensors to measure abiotic data (water temperature, salinity, and turbidity). These parameters can influence the concentration of microplastics. The collected microplastic and small contaminants were stored and taken on shore for their analysis.

 

Scientific work onshore

The participants learned how to assess microplastic samples using an analytical protocol from the scientific literature that was modified so that is can be used by upper secondary school pupils.

The students were divided in 10 groups. They analysed the environmental samples and other samples consisting of the JRC's reference materials dissolved in demineralized and seawater. The main objective was to demonstrate the importance of reference material to validate an analytical method.

The students used a fluorescent dye (Nile Red) with an excitation light (Royal blue). This is a relatively new rapid and inexpensive test used by scientists to identify and quantify microplastics. The technique was first proposed in 2017 in the prestigious journal 'Nature'. See:

( https://www.nature.com/articles/srep44501 ).

All the laboratory material was transported from Belgium.

 

Figure 1 shows the amounts of microplastics from the reference materials samples that the students found in pure water (blue bar) and seawater (green bar) with an average amount of particles counted in pure water was 70.

The average recovery for all groups was 79.5%. This is less than the recovery of 88.4% obtained in the validation process in Belgium. This can of course be explained by short time dedicated to train the participant. The results were shown to the learners to demonstrate how operators can influence the results while using the same methodology.

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Additionally the students carried out an experiment on microplastics in cosmetics. If interested, you can contact the project responsible, mrs. Arancha Gomez (Vila-real) or the project coordinator on patrick.remmerie@maricolen.be.