Filtering of farmed produce Students develop and pitch innovative solution at Global Ideas Institute
For nearly 10 years, Pickering College has participated in an annual challenge to tackle a real-world problem without a solution, hosted by the Global Ideas Institute, an initiative of the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. This year’s team, comprised of Grade 12 students Vanessa Gardner, Emily Golding, Brooke Baker, Rachel Sorbara and Grade 11 student Madeleine Rickman, was tasked with solving the issue of plastics and plastic waste in the world. With the project’s direction entirely left up to each team, our students decided to tackle microplastics in farmed produce and, bucking convention, examined their issue at the local level with an eye to potentially scaling it up globally. “They started thinking about how plastics enter the water table,” says Kim Bartlett, Director of Teaching and Learning at Pickering College. “Farmers growing food, taking water from that water table and spraying it onto produce. Therefore, the red peppers that you buy in the grocery store have already been coated in microplastics. So the team designed a filter system that could be put onto irrigation systems, using graphene and adaptors, so it’s actually able to filter out the microplastics from the water when it’s being irrigated.”
the product, which the team calculated would cost approximately $50 per unit. Armed with a slick presentation that included a video (with help from Justin Kim, Grade 12), a product logo (with help from Lili Strawbridge, Grade 12), and a proper engineering poster, our students blew the panel of judges away. Panelist Paula Gallo, Project Manager at Evergreen Brick Works in Toronto, says what really struck people about the PC team’s presentation was that it focused on working out the details in a local context with local partners first, before making the leap of applying it globally. “There was a lot of murmuring about them doing a fantastic job! The girls seemed really confident in how they were presenting their product … like they had really thought it through,” says Gallo. “They came up with a very practical solution—it was innovative in the sense that I don’t think anyone had thought of it in the room—and they were able to answer questions really well.”
Fellow panelist, Kris Hornberg who is the Manager, Program & Strategic Initiatives with Solid Waste Management Services for the City of Toronto adds, “I think that there is a viability for this type of product in the market. I believe some farmers, perhaps those that are geared The team more than did its homework. In more towards eco-products, may want addition to their research, they consulted to include this as part of helping their produce stand out from the crowd. From with experts including PC alumnus a personal perspective, I take my own Nick LaValle ’14 who works in the health very seriously, and if I knew a environmental sphere and has founded a start-up company to remove microplastics certain farmer had a more sophisticated from freshwater rivers and lakes. They also filtration option, I would likely make the effort to find produce from them.” spoke with the owner of a local market garden farm who was excited by what Bartlett credits the Global Leadership the PC team proposed. He even offered Program for preparing the team so well, to pilot it for them if they actually built
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