Blue Trails – Navigating Ocean Literacy for a Sustainable Tomorrow
Constanta, Romania
1st FUNDING CALL
The project we intend to carry out is focused on the problem of microplastic, an extremely important problem nowadays. Our goal is to make as many people as possible aware of how the impact that plastic has on our lives can be limited. For this, we will use the projects already developed on microplastic by the students of our high school and, at the same time, bring more schools, more students and more teachers with us. We will collaborate with three more high schools in Romania, located far from the Black Sea coast, in order to help them “find the blue” in their communities.
Each of the three schools will develop its own water-related project relevant to its community and, through it, will apply to be part of the European Network of Blue Schools in 2024. In this endeavour, we will collaborate with research institutes, NGOs, and universities in Constanța. Ovidius Highschool is part of the Network of European Blue Schools since 2020, from the beginning of this initiative. We applied then to be part of the NEBS with a project focused on microplastic pollution, which was quite a new topic for us, and we developed a procedure to collect, analyze and produce data on Black Sea water pollution with microplastic. Furthermore, we continued to investigate this topic in the next years and to present our findings in several environmental projects contests for students, at local, national as well as European level.
We also tried to find a way to reduce the impact of plastic in our daily lives by encouraging the students to come up with an idea of producing bioplastic and integrating marine algae biomass in the process. while presenting our project and attending different events, like science fairs, we realized that microplastic issues are quite unknown by the general public, both kids and adults. That is why we came up with the following objectives for our project: – to increase the number of students from “Ovidius” high school who attend workshops on ocean sciences topics, especially on microplastics, and to reduce the impact of plastic pollution in our school. – to expand our research on microplastic in the local freshwater bodies as well as the Danube River water -to increase the number of Romanian schools applying to be part of NEBS.
Funded by the European Union