A Day in the Life of a Water Scientist

From ‘Is there poo in stormwater?’ to ‘What are the effects of climate change on water’ to ‘Is it safe to eat fish?’ and ‘Can you drink water from a filtered sample?’…I was honoured to be bombarded with a range of challenging questions from curious and well-informed primary school students from City of Sydney Schools at a webinar hosted last week as part of National Science Week.

I presented on ‘A Day in the Life of a Water Scientist’ to 61 students whose schools are participating in a Waste Avoidance Program run by Plastic Oceans Australasia - a global network of independent not-for-profits and charitable organisations, united in their aim to change the world’s attitude towards plastic within a generation.

My employer, @Aurecon, supports me in sitting on Plastics Oceans Australasia Technical Advisory Panel as part of my role as National Lead for Water Quality and Catchment Science. My contribution strongly aligns with Aurecon’s approach to managing sustainability within its business and, in particular, adoption of the UN Sustainable Development Goals principles, including SDG-14 Life Below Water.

As my colleagues explored in this article We’re all responsible for the microplastics in our waterways (aurecongroup.com) and in the Just Image blog Microplastics: Small plastics, big problem - Just Imagine (aurecongroup.com), understanding about the long-term effects of plastics in waterways on the environment is limited. Water treatment plants currently have insufficient capacity to extract some of the smaller microplastics from wastewater, which is a concern from an environmental standpoint, but also an opportunity for research, technology and innovation.

The original intent before rolling COVID-19 lockdowns was to run a face-face interactive session hosted by a school in the City of Sydney. This was going to cover an exciting new Plastic Oceans Australasia Plastic Waterway Detectives research project that I am leading to investigate the characteristics, source, transport, and flux of coarse particulate plastics in urban stormwater systems.

Recent global efforts to understand these questions in oceans are being studied, however, information in Australia is limited with research not characterising the type and quantity of coarse plastic waste in waterways that discharge into our marine systems. In the long run, we need to trace the sources of pollution and stop the problem in stormwater systems and rivers before it enters the ocean. Rivers aren’t just waterways that carry water – and trash – to the sea. Plastic pollution damages visual aesthetics but can also cause ecological damage by entanglement or ingestion. In addition, they can act as a vector for other micropollutants due to adsorption of toxicants and bacteria onto their surface. The aim of my webinar was to engage students in thinking about this important topic and, whilst not my usual audience, these budding scientists are a very important one in terms of advocating for and influencing future societal changes and impacts.

The project is innovative in that it will leverage existing effort from volunteer clean-up groups, local government authorities, and water utilities; adding value by collecting additional information (e.g. geo-referenced clean-up locations, plastic material classification, quantity of material collected), that will be recorded via a user-friendly app. Rather than focus on one location, these partnerships with existing clean-up organisations?will allow Plastic Oceans Australasia to collate coarse plastics data on a Trans-Tasman scale using a mapping database. The ultimate outcome of this research can provide a more in-depth understanding of coarse plastic waste in waterways to enable Plastic Oceans Australasia to target prevention and mitigation measures to particular industries, regional hotspots, stormwater transfer mechanisms, and times of the year which are responsible for disproportionate contributions to amounts of plastic that are present in waterways.

Recognising the challenges of running an interactive session for students via a virtual platform (and hats off to all the educators and remote learners doing just that around the country!), we changed the focus of the webinar to the health of our waterways, using a hypothetical example of a stormwater pollution incident. I presented a ‘detective case’ of an unsolved fish kill incident in a saltwater lagoon and showed some techniques scientists use to test water including:

• Fluorescent dye tracing with time-lapse photography to show the dilution and mixing from a stormwater outlet
• Water sampling / filtering and in-situ testing with a handheld meter
• Sediment core collection to show sediment depth and composition
• Bug identification

I am reliably informed that a highlight for the students was the presenter tipping overtopping water out of his boots during water sample collection!

There were some amazing questions raised by the students at the end of the event, and the overwhelmingly positive feedback from teachers really showed how engaged and passionate the group is about the environment.

I’m looking forward to presenting our Plastic Waterways Detectives research project on another day, and involving students in piloting the collection app. In the meantime, they now know what it takes to conduct a pollution investigation on a watercourse. Who knows, maybe plastics in waterways will inspire a new breed of Sherlock Holmes stormwater detectives!

These thoughts are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of Plastic Oceans Austrasia nor of Aurecon.

A recording of yesterdays ‘A Day in the Life of a Water Scientist’ event will be made available on the POA events page of their website shortly: https://www.plasticoceans.org.au/updates