All students come from a community service team First Step (founded in 2020). One of their main activities is trash cleanup in public places such as schools, parks, trails and parking lots. These students have long been aware that most trash consists of plastic, so they have been thinking about how to raise awareness, persuade people to stop littering, and even explore ways to contribute to scientific research.

• $5,000 grants from the Bloomberg Philanthropy’s Youth Climate Action Fund

• Guidance from the City of Atlanta Mayor’s Office of Sustainability and Resilience, and 21st Century Leaders.

• Technical support from GA Tech and Georgia Gwinnett College’s faculty, students and laboratory

• Parent volunteers served as drivers for sample collection and delivery trips

• To master sampling techniques, each student was trained three times (one on Zoom and two in person), more than 5 hours in total.

• To maintain effective communication within a large group, students used Zoom, Discord, email, and a buddy system to help each other.

• To cope with the busy schedules after school started in August, students took time out of their weekends and evenings to collect water samples, design posters, meet online, and organize the forum/exhibition.

• To solve the problem of insufficient funding, students discussed with the owner of Johns Creek Event Center to let them rent the venue at half price; in return, they took on all the cleaning work themselves.