Founder and director, Fillosophy Ltd
I run an Environmental Consultancy Company, Fillosophy which focuses on building a Circular Economy for plastics - working with corporates and the waste industry on practical measures to reduce unnecessary plastic consumption, increase recycling rates, and reduce contamination.
In addition, I have been focusing on ocean plastic and microplastic pollution in particular, working with Plymouth University and Viridor on a campaign to engage the public with how they can become involved in understanding more about their own impact and how they can engage in becoming circular citizens.
In March, I was working with Nurdle, a CIC start-up, who had designed a machine to clear microplastics from beaches. I was mentoring and advising them and we were working on a research project which involved carrying out desk and field studies and then running beach cleans on 36 of the worst affected beaches in the southwest of England.
We had set up an event app to engage as many people as possible with the sponsored tour which was due to run from March until May (after which we were heading to clean beaches in Portugal and California!). Over 10,000 people were anticipated in total across the 36 events.
We carried out the first beach clean event and then lockdown hit. The whole tour was canceled. Not wanting to waste the mobile app we approached CrowdCompass and investigated how we could use this to host an education challenge so that the tour could take place virtually. Eco-Schools England agreed to use the mobile app program as The Microplastic Challenge - 30 schools in the South West of England took part in the competition with 300 students downloading the app.
The mobile app took the children on a virtual tour of the southwest of England. They received push notifications all through lockdown that would take them virtually to a beach. When they came to that beach, they got a link to a Turtl Doc and their plastic challenge, surveys, and polls. 36 Turtl Docs in total were hosted via the mobile app as part of the challenge.
One of my favourite examples was the Storm In a Tea Cup Challenge which informed families about the history of tea bags and the potential issue with microplastics formed due to some brands of tea bags containing plastics. After reading the Turtl Doc, students wrote to their favourite tea bag brand to pose the question: do they use plastics in their teabags?
I have been a teacher and educational writer and have had a lot of experience in educational publishing - writing resources, books, and film scripts.
A key part of creating any content is understanding your audience. As a teacher, it is important to understand the perspective and prior learning of your students. This allows you to understand where people are coming from and what their interest level will be. For these particular Docs, our audiences were primary school children, secondary school students, and their families. Some who would be engaged and some who may have no interest in environmental issues.
When I created the Turtl Docs, it was a case of writing through the lens of the audience and getting the mix between visual images, text, audio, and surveys in the right balance to maintain and engage participants for as long as possible. Incorporating different and diverse media is key, and something which Turtl was able to facilitate. It was great fun, I really enjoyed making them.
Use the incredibly helpful staff at Turtl! The self-help tools are brilliant, you can find everything there, but I prefer to speak with someone.
When I set up my account, I was given an amazing training session which gave me everything I needed to know. Going forward as I produced more and more Turtl Docs and became more proficient. If I had any questions or needed advice from Turtl I reached out via the online chat message service. The response rates were incredibly quick; it was always instant and personalized. I felt that the Turtl staff were a part of my project.
I think everyone has enjoyed seeing and using the Turtl Docs we created - we hope to be able to use these great resources and rebrand them and issue them to a wider audience in 2021 when we find a new sponsor.