Microplastics

Microplastics are found everywhere in the environment and affect marine life. Miguel Felismino is a Concordia Sustainability Ambassador and Master’s Biology student who is working with CP3 on collecting different size microplastics from the shredding process.

Current progress: The shredded plastic was passed through a series of sieves using a shaker in order to sort the different size microplastics. Next, the microplastics were analyzed using a FTIR spectroscopy to confirm the type of plastic.

Thank you to Dr. Soliman, Dr. Wood-Adams and Dr. Kwok for your collaboration.

Next step: To look at the microplastic under a microscope to analyze the shape and implement a fluorescent dye to use in research.

Making recycled Filament

3D printing creates a lot of waste and virgin filament is costly. CP3 members are currently working to make filament from recycled PLA. In the future, we also want to make recycled filament from PETG and HDPE. This is done with the 3devo filament maker, which allows us to make spools of filament from recycled plastic pellets.

Digitizing Waste

In collaboration with Zero Waste Concordia and Software Engineering students, we are developing a mobile application that will allow the user to identify waste items to be disposed of using the built-in camera and a computer vision/machine learning model and will provide a recommendation on how to ecologically dispose of the item (compost, recycle, reuse).