Waste Not, Want Not has moved!!

The blog has moved to my new integrated website. Includes all site information and the blog. See it at http://jambeck.engr.uga.edu. All of these old posts have been migrated as well. Enjoy!

Send us your Marine Debris!

Many volunteers will be cleaning up debris for the International Coastal Cleanup September 25. I am creating a database of the "average" weight of various debris items, so I need your debris! If you are willing to send marine debris (I cannot fund the shipping at this time) to be weighed in a scientific research project, please send a bucket or large zip-loc baggie full of marine debris along with a piece of paper that has:

1) The date it was collected

2) The beach/location it was collected at

IMPORTANT, I must have the above information or I will not be able to include it in the database. Also note, debris will not be returned. Also, I can only handle U.S. Debris at this time.

Ship to:

Jenna Jambeck

University of Georgia

412 Driftmier Engineering Center

Athens, GA  30602

Phone: 706-542-6454

Any questions, feel free to email me at marinedebrisweights@gmail.com.

Thank you so much for your contribution to science and to the study of marine debris!

Geo-Log

My colleague Kyle Johnsen and I developed a tool for research and teaching to Geotag data. It is a skeleton for a marine debris mobile application I will be putting out this fall as a part of a NOAA grant, but Geo-Log is more general and flexible. You can log and map... ANYTHING! Just make an effort, make a list and start logging. The data is available to view online in a map or list, or download the data into Excel or as a .kml file for Google Earth. We hope it will be useful to many and it will be available on the Android Market and for iPhone soon. To learn more go to the website here >>>

Environmental Science and Technology Commentary on the Oil Spill

Thank you Dr. Schnoor, Editor of Environmental Science and Technology, for your well written and insightful commentary about the Gulf Oil Spill. To read it, click here >>>

A Marine Debris Story

A digital camera in a waterproof case was dropped at sea near Aruba and washed ashore in Key West, FL. It also was carried some way by a sea turtle as shown on this YouTube video. You can see the turtle thrashing about while the camera strap is connected to it. This story gives a first hand look at how any debris or trash at sea can travel many miles... and how it nearly always impacts wildlife. While a nice personal story from the standpoint of the man who located the camera's owner, I also see it as a lesson in marine debris travel and impacts.
More details on the story here >>>

Map of UGA Trash Cans and Recycle Bins Complete

Thanks to two great undergraduate students who did an independent study with me this spring (Shanell Davis and Malin Dartnell), I now have a map of the trash cans (both permanent and mobile) and recycle bins/cans (both for containers and containers+paper) on the University of Georgia campus. Special thanks to the UGA Office of Sustainability's Mark Milby. Also, a very special thanks to Alex Devine, GIS Technical Coordinator from UGA Architects for Facilities Planning for helping me overcome my Google Earth "bug" to get all my layers in one project. I will update this blog with a link to the project on my website, but for now, here is a screen shot. More spatial analysis data to follow too.

Tiny Creatures, Big Plans (from Waste Age Magazine)

An article on my EREF funded microbial fuel cell research is in the current (May 2010) issue of Waste Age Magazine.

Click here to read it >>>