Discovering Plastic Pollution in Bali With 5 Gyres

We're on a massive adventure in Indonesia. This expedition is designed to collect plastic pollution data, bringing together a group of participants to really train them in our citizen science. They'll go back to their own community to talk about the issue and really encourage solutions. We categorize and count the number of plastic pieces. We're analyzing what we can see with our eyes. The citizen science protocols that we've developed over the years, and that we can train anyone to do, and they follow the guidelines, then we can use that data in our larger data set to generate a global estimate of plastic pollution. I was thinking before to measure the waste is something very science-based with the terminology that people will think, what the hell are you talking about? But when I see it, it's very easy. We're also doing a brand audit for a coalition called Break Free From Plastic. This involves collecting everything on the beach, and we log all of the different types of plastics and the different brands of plastic. In many cases, you tally the same brand over and over. But now I got this method. It doesn't matter your educational background or your income level. I'm very happy that I will come home and then apply this method. And then we're also keeping the smaller fraction to send to the lab. We will see potentially microfibers, small, small plastic fragments, microbeads if there's any out here. So the data that we collect on this expedition is going to be comparable to our data from all of our expeditions. Our data that we've collected throughout our expeditions has acted as evidence that plastic pollution is a problem in the ocean. Be able to understand the types of plastics that we can target as the problem. One of the big solutions to plastic pollution is calling out companies that are really contributing to the problem and asking them to design better products. We really want design change, innovation to be front and center when we're talking about solutions to plastic pollution. Or you can work to get some policy passed to force innovation almost. Or, in some cases, it straight up bans single-use plastic items that shouldn't exist, that people use for only a few moments and then you throw it away. But when you throw it away, it can't even be recycled.