S-STEM/TRAIN Scholar Jasmine Patricio

March 26, 2018 ( Day 21). This is the last week that the tea pods will be in the light incubator, and this will be the first month completion of the teapods. So far what has happened is that the water has drastically changed color. It went from a clear water color to a dusty brown color. What has also happened is that the tea pods first were all hanging on from the chain and had rust growing on them, then after a week the chains broke and all the tea pods sinked to the bottom, where they continued to grow rust on the surface of the teapods. What also started growing on the teapods is what seems like maybe fungus growing on top of the rust or the teapods still. I will start writing a protocol for this project and figuring out the next steps that will be needing to be run by this experiment as well.

(March 19, 2018) Hey everyone welcome back! Hope everyone had a great Spring Break and got the rest that we all needed. The second I got into lab today I went to check on the the microplastic that have been sitting in the light incubator with the Tempe Water only to find that the chains had broken and they all sunked down. Which is very interesting because the they are designed for resistance in water. Also in the beginning Plastic 5 was the one that was floating the whole week and over spring break it seems like even plastic 5 sunk down but now plastic 2 is the one that is floating. I still have 17 more days till I could run some test on the plastic,but for the meanwhile I will be doing some research on biodegradation and the process of lake cleanings and the chemicals that could perhaps be put in the lakes.

One gallon of Tempe Town Lake water was collected and kept in the fridge until all plastic was ready and in its correct form of 5mm or smaller to fit the characteristic of microplastic size.  There are a total of six tea pods and in each tea pod there are a total of 0.5 grams of microplastics they are currently being kept in an light incubator at 32 °C. The tea pods and water sample will be kept in the light incubator for one month, and we will be observing bacteria growth on the microplastic and see if perhaps the bacteria degraded the micro plastic and which kind of plastic was most affected by it by observing weight loss. The first picture on the top left is the water and plastic before placing it in the light incubator and the picture next to it is Day 2; there was brown somewhat like algae that started to grow on top of the the tea pods. Day 3; is the bottom left and the brown part started growing more and around the tea pods. The picture next to that is Day 4; as y...

This week during lab Maricruz and I got back to shredding plastic SPI6. While shredding I came to notice that the powerade bottle we were shredding was really think and harder to shred than the small water bottle that is extremely thin. We have to shred a total of 3 grams but it takes a while to shred. Also I noticed that my hands get a little itchy and extremely red when I start to use the machine. But Maricruz is extremely helpful and always takes over when my hands get really itchy. We should get enough plastic by next week before spring break and we should also get the water sample and start detecting the bacteria growth within the plastics.