Portal de Cartagena
www.portaldecartagena.com
"Reject disposable plastic.
If you can not reuse it, reject it, "summarizes the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, the central message of the World Environment Day that takes place on Tuesday and coincides with the project of citizen science and awareness that is developing the University Polytechnic of Cartagena (UPCT).
Secondary students have participated in the assembly of a plastics shredder in Support Service for Technological Instrumentation (SAIT).
"The plastic crushed by the mill goes to the extruder, which converts it into a printing filament and from there to a winder that we have also assembled to pick up the filament", explains Lola Ojados, from the Industrial Design and Scientific Calculation Service.
Students will also learn to assemble the 3D printer that will use plastic waste as raw material for the additive manufacturing of objects.
"The objective is a functional recycling, in which the collected material has a social utility," argues Polytechnic professor Joaquin Roca Gonzalez, who has proposed to give a second use to plastics by building low-cost prostheses in the form of a shovel. the beach or racket "so that children can play without fear of breaking their expensive prostheses," he reasons.
The prostheses have been designed by students of the degree in Electronic Engineering of the UPCT within a teaching innovation project with the methodology Learning-Service (ApS), which guides the academic work for purposes of social utility.
The initiative of the UPCT is part of the 'Coastal Aid Program in Secondary School.
PALS!
Stop Marine Litter 'through which students of IES Ruiz de Alda of San Javier and IES Las Salinas de La Manga are cleaning beaches and mapping the presence of microplastics on the coast of the Region of Murcia.
"It is an example of citizen science, which provides information that scientists would find very expensive to collect", highlights José Luis Serrano, coordinator of the Unit of Scientific Culture and Innovation of the UPCT.
The students have taken the samples they have taken on the beaches to the laboratories of the UPCT, where they have identified and characterized the marine debris that the waves deposit in the coastal sands.
The presence of microplastics in the oceans and their introduction into the trophic chain is a global problem that is being studied internationally.
With this project, which has the collaboration of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology-Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness, the UPCT aims to make a contribution to the monitoring programs developed at the national level.
Robotics to locate marine garbage
In parallel, researchers from the group in Ecosystems led by Javier Gilabert at the Polytechnic University of Cartagena (UPCT) have demonstrated the effectiveness of a new methodology, combining numerical models and underwater robotics, to find objects under the sea and have developed a garbage map submerged
Specifically, in the Port of Cartagena, in a perimeter of 260 meters, they have detected more than 200 objects, among which cans and plastics predominate.
"Most of these objects came from the Mediterranean and had been dragged to the port," says researcher Francisco López Castejón.
The researchers, who have been working on the Rómulo project for a year, funded by the Biodiversity Foundation and Ecoembes, have developed a specific program, based on a hydrodynamic and three-dimensional model (ROMS) of marine currents, to detect the agglomeration of garbage.
Source: UPCT
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