Save The Ocean

17.6 billion pounds of plastic enter the ocean every year. We believe that people need to be educated on pollution and its long term threats to take action and help save the ocean.

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Hi! We're team Berries and the track our project falls under is Best Website. We created the website Save the Ocean: https://savetheocean.glitch.me/#about

What's the problem?

As synthetic polymers, also known as plastic is a lightweight, durable, and a convenient substance. It is everywhere from the air we breathe to our beloved oceans. This poses a global threat and change must happen.

To understand plastic's long-term effects, we must first take a look at what just one plastic object can do. Let's take a plastic water bottle and look at two scenarios:

1- So what happens if I place my empty water bottle in the trash? It ends up in a landfill. Here, it is compressed with other trash. Rainwater then absorbs the water-soluble compounds and some of these are highly toxic. This creates leachate, a harmful substance that spreads into groundwater, soil, and streams that harms wildlife.

2- When the plastic reaches a stream, it is carried by currents to the ocean. After a few months, it is drawn into a vortex known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch - one of the 5 largest gyres in the world seas. Sea birds get tangled in this trash and other ocean animals do too. When they consume this plastic, they pass these toxins through the food chain from fish and whales to us humans. If the plastic is not consumed, it is biodegraded and turns into microplastics. These microplastics float around in the ocean eternally.

Our solution: Save the Ocean

We built a website to try to solve this problem. We believe that our website will help decrease the amount of plastic in the ocean in a few ways.

First, we educate our users about the necessity to keep our oceans clean. We do this by displaying a live counter of the amount of plastic in the oceans. On our website, we also have a page that lists various resources and ways that our viewers can help. These include videos on related topics such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as well as articles that highlight Water Pollution in depth. On our ways to help page, we list some simple changes that we can make to our lives to help out our oceans. These tips range from simple changes to larger-scale activities. Some small-scale changes include using reusable bags and water bottles, and, avoiding plastic packaging. Some of our larger-scale activities include organizations to donate to and ways to volunteer with organizations to help clean up oceans.

Another feature on our website, ocean trivia, is aimed to show our users the prevalence of trash in our oceans and the necessity to take action. We do this by quizzing our users on statistics on ocean pollution. We hope that this will show users that in order to help ocean wildlife, we need to take action immediately. We also hope that our users will share the quiz among friends to challenge each other to get higher scores. This would also spread awareness of ocean pollution as well.

In addition to these features, we also have fun interactives that help users visualize statistics such as the amount of plastic in the oceans in their area. We also have linked maps that display the water quality in nearby areas. We have also coded a few games and interactives. One such interactive shows how animals are constantly trapped in these plastics and how this continues up the food chain. We also have a game that teaches our users to make simple changes that we can make to help the environment. In this game, users help Abby make environmentally-friendly choices as she plans for a picnic.

We also have a social media bingo challenge. On this board, users can cross out the eco-friendly items that they have incorporated into their daily lives. Users can also tag friends in their posts to encourage others to participate in the challenge and raise awareness together. We hope that with these efforts in our day-to-day lives, we can make an impact in the long run.

How we built Save The Ocean

We built our website using Javascript, HTML, and CSS. We used the platform Glitch to code our website live. Our first step was to plan out the basic layout of our website. Then, we then planned out the features for our app making sure to maintain user-friendly and functional settings. We then used Glitch to code our app. We used HTML for the framework for our app and CSS for input functions such as our quiz.

What's next for Save The Ocean

In the future, we hope to have a feature where we can create a profit off of our games. We would like to donate the profit that we make to important ocean cleaning organizations to fund their explorations and clean-up processes. Another future addition we hope to make is to create a point system where users will be rewarded for picking up trash and taking steps to improve our oceans.

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