Angela-Mistakes to Avoid

As my search for plastic on Florida's beaches comes to an end (for the semester), I can definitely confirm that, to my surprise, some of our beaches are littered with plastic fragments ranging in size smaller than 1cm to larger than 10cm. Additionally, the east coast wins the plastic content contest with four and half two-quart jars filled versus not even a quarter of a jar of plastic found on the west coast. 

Originally I thought it was a good idea to collect all my plastic and then go over my findings, however, it is taking me about three to four hours to catalog the content of each jar. This is my current separation method:

- "Ocean Plastic" & "Unsure", then

- "Small Fragments", "Large Fragments", and "Identifiable Pieces" (which are further broken down into bottle caps, pen caps, straws, etc), then

- color, then

- finally separate by sizes: less than 1cm, 1-2cm, 2-3cm, 3-5cm, 5-10cm, and 10cm or more

If anyone else ever wants to repeat or do similar research the following are my recommendations:

- If you decide to have categories, e.g. "Ocean Plastic", "Unsure", separate the pieces into different jars as you are finding them on the beach. Initially I only separated resin pellets from the rest of the contents and even added sediment to the jars for microbead inspection; however, most of my jars have over 200 pieces that I am now examining and separating one by one.

- To weigh my plastic I made aluminum foil "beakers" that I wasn't quite content with and ended up getting an aluminum camping mug (which I immerse in boiling water after each jar of plastic). However, all the weighing I'm doing is significantly impacted by sediment sticking to the plastic. I would recommend to let it air out for a week in order to shake off as much dry sediment as possible in order to get more accurate measurements. I didn't want to rinse my plastic pieces since I plan on doing additional experiments on them.

- Turns out white shell pieces can look an awful lot like plastic. White pieces are taking me an extra long time since I am trying to make 100% sure I'm not mistaking shell for plastic (can't do a float test since I don't want to wash away any chemicals off the actual plastic pieces).

- If you are putting everything in one jar, examine and separate the content as soon as possible. Some of the biogenous material, the identifier I'm using for ocean plastic, has decomposed or unattached from the plastic, thus some of my pieces that could have been identified as ocean plastic are probably ending up in the "Unsure" pile.