Providence Day School’s ninth-grade eCYBERMISSION team of Morgan Boonshaft, Katherine Liu, Laura Plata, Pavan Thakkar, and Jodie Yan will use their $5,000 STEM-in-Action Grant awarded in June of 2020 to purchase a plastic shredder that will process plastic bottles found in oceans, lakes, and rivers. 

Last year, this group of students from PD placed first out of all eighth-grade participants in North Carolina and were one of the top three first-place teams in the Southeast Region. Each team member was also awarded $2,000 in US Savings Bonds for placing first in the state and qualifying for the region. The team created a prototype that allows dirty plastic bottles found in bodies of water to be placed in a shredder that will then feed the shredded, cut plastic into a container that cleans the pieces. The Catawba Riverkeepers organization continues to provide the team with plastic for this project.

Since the group received the STEM-in-Action Grant, an assigned mentor who is a plastics expert works with their team. The design and the plan have changed with the decision to reuse shredded plastic rather than recycle it. “Originally, we were going to build our own machine [to shred the plastic] but we realized that it would be too expensive and we didn’t have the skillset for that or contact with professionals who could do it for us,” says Yan. 

“We discussed different ideas on what to do to make the plastic smaller and we’ve decided on buying a shredder from an organization known as Precious Plastic,” says Liu. “They are a worldwide organization that focuses on repurposing plastic and all-things plastic.” While the team initially explored using a wood chipper to shred the plastic, they determined that the plastic pieces were too big for reuse.

The process for cleaning the bottles evolved this year as well. “You have a giant plastic bottle and if you try to clean the inside of the bottle, getting the solution inside is a lot harder to do when you have the bottle in its entirety instead of in smaller pieces,” says Plata. “We thought if we shredded the plastic first and then cleaned it, it would be a much more efficient process.” 

There are challenges with this approach, though. Plastic bottles with a neck are #4 LDPE (Low-Density Polyethylene) and, “Although the recycling facilities will take #4 LDPE, they can’t do it because it’s really dirty and they don’t want the shredded plastic,” adds Plata. “You can’t send it to recycling facilities because they won’t take shredded plastic and if you send it to them whole, they won’t take it dirty. We have to figure out what we’re going to do with it and who we are going to give it to.” The team is exploring options to donate the shredded pieces to an organization or send it to a university for research purposes. 

Recycling facilities, including those in Charlotte, are struggling to find manufacturers who want to purchase plastic. Most bottles are not fully clean when they are placed in bins, so when plastic bottles are put into large bales and melted down for recycling, there is a lot of contamination that inhibits the manufacturing process. “Typically, plastic sent to recycling facilities will sit there for a long time. Reusing impacts our community more directly than recycling does,” Liu says. “That’s why we’re hoping to go more toward reusing.”

For the next phase of the project, the team remains focused on identifying the right organization to receive the shredded plastic and the bigger goal of eCYBERMISSION participation. “The grant is really to put the project to action to make the community a better place,” says Liu. “It’s about giving back to our community.” 

eCYBERMISSION is a web-based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) competition for students in grades six through nine that promotes self-discovery and enables all students to recognize the real-life applications of STEM. Teams of three or four students are instructed to ask questions (for science) or define problems (for engineering), and then construct explanations (for science) or design solutions (for engineering) based on identified problems in their community. Students compete for State, Regional, and National Awards. The U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program is committed to answering the Nation’s need for increased national STEM literacy and to expanding STEM education opportunities across the country to open doors to new career paths for American students that lead to a brighter tomorrow. – ecybermission.com