Ocean Soul

Inspiration: Our team wanted to build a project raising social awareness towards worldwide problems easily neglected by people during this global pandemic. When people are concerned about the pandemic, the negative consequences of daily necessities—masks—are unaware to people. I often see disposal masks on the ground. Where do they go if not picked up and put in the bins? They will end up in the ocean. We want more people to be aware of this problem and act to avoid worsening the condition.

What it does: Our website aimed to spread information and raise awareness about the plastic pollution caused by the used masks discarded by people. We want to remind people that their action of littering masks would cause a significant negative effect on marine life, worsening the already-existed plastic pollution. We should keep caring about our environment even during the pandemic.

How we built it: We use web builder wix.com to help design our website. We research for news and journal articles to gather data to demonstrate the issues. We insert educational youtube videos and pictures about pollution to raise awareness. We use Javascript to write an interactive game to let viewers try to estimate the negative effect generated by the number of masks used like how many marine animals will be killed.

Challenges we ran into: Since the plastic pollution caused by masks is relatively new pollution during the pandemic, it was hard to find accessible scientific data and research about it. We tried to find data to help us show and predict the situation nowadays and in the future.

What’s next for our website: We want to build a more informative and interactive website, which may take more time than just 24 hours. We will add more information about plastic pollution caused by masks that end in landfills. Because the masks contain plastic, which cannot be decomposed easily, we want to gather more information in this area. We want to update news about these environmental issues and keep track of how scientists will solve problems like recycling disposable masks.