Are there any patterns in the type and use of certain plastics across each of the Great Lakes?

Goal: Understanding the distribution of plastics throughout the Great Lakes.

For the capstone project during my time at Correlation One's Data Science for All | Empowerment program, my team wanted to explore an environmental project of some type. One of my team members suggested the effects of plastic pollution on local ecosystems. We quickly realized that a project of that scope would be difficult to accomplish with the time we had so we pivoted to understanding the distribution of plastics throughout the Great Lakes (the dataset can be found in 'Plastic debris in the Laurentian Great Lakes System, North America: Analysis of types, abundances, and sources' by Ian Arturo).

Methods Used

We cleaned up some of the data columns and spent a lot of time exploring the data using boxplots, scatterplots, and bar graphs. After settling on some visuals, we used Chi-squared tests and Kruskal-Wallis tests to compare plastic content at the beach and Great Lakes levels.

Results

• Each of the Great Lake beaches generally have similar concentrations of plastic in terms of count.

• Plastic pollution is an ongoing issue in the Great Lakes with primary plastic types found varying between beaches.

• More research on the effects of certain polymers on local ecosystems is needed.

If you want to see the above graphs in greater detail, please click below to open the datafolio’s pdf in a new tab.