SCI-ENCE!

My hope is that you read the title of this blog post as Oprah would when she is announcing something she is excited about. If you didn't, do that now before reading any further.
     OK, you might know at this point that I hate plastics and I love science. The hating plastics comes through rather bluntly, so that is obvious, but the loving science may be a bit more subtly conveyed with the use of facts and figures. Anyways, one of my colleagues recently sent me a link to a story of the teenager that won the grand prize at this year's Google Science Fair. He found a way to bind up microplastics in the ocean with iron compounds and then remove the mixtures with magnets. SCI-ENCE!
     I encourage you to read the story. There is still work to do before we go ahead and throw a bunch of ferrous compounds into the ocean and pass giant magnets over it (such as making sure that the ferrous compounds don't do their own damage in the ocean, you don't want to try to solve one problem and then create another....I could talk for days about examples of that!), but I love that a young person is working on tackling this problem using basic principles he learned in high school chemistry. What I love even more is the last line of the article. You'll have to read it for yourself. But if we could get all the young people together on that sentiment, we'd really be able to make some progress.