During the summer of 2025 I was awarded a MITACS Accelerate Internship. This internship partners with a university and community or industry partner to provide students with research in work fields. For my internship I partnered with Thompson Rivers University and the City of Kamloops and we developed a research project that would target improvements to the new composting facility in Kamloops. Composting in a much more environmentally friendly way of dealing with municipal food waste however, due to human miss-use or improper understanding of what composting is for, there is lots of plastic that is contaminating the compost piles. Over the summer it was my goal to identify plastic contamination in compost in the form of microplastics. This was done through various microscopy and spectroscopy techniques like fluorescent microscopy, UV-Vis spectroscopy and Raman spectroscopy. In addition through this internship we also begun planning a new strategy to break down any microplastics in the compost using native bacteria that have specialized metabolisms that degrade plastics.
MITACS Interim Report with the City of Kamloops