Goulburn High School student wins NSW Young Scientist Award

The project by Goulburn High School's Mary Hyland looked at micro-plastics in locations including farming lands around Goulburn.

Ms Hyland was awarded second place in the Earth and Environmental Science category and highly commended in the Rural Young Scientist Award.

READ MORE:

"I found that there was pretty much no micro-plastics before Goulburn but on the site in town there was actually macro-plastics, and at the sites in town there was micro-plastics in the water," Ms Hyland said.

"That tells me that the township of Goulburn is putting plastics and micro-plastics into the waterways, which is a big problem because Goulburn isn't that big of a town and we don't generate that much waste and yet we are still putting it into the water."

Earlier this year Ms Hyland was selected to be part of a curious minds program, a Science, Engineering, Technology, and Mathematics [STEM] coaching program for female students.

"We looked at micro-plastics in sand from a beach in Sydney and I wanted to localise that to Goulburn," Ms Hyland said.

"I wanted to see how Goulburn is impacting that and I wanted to raise awareness to the fact that micro-plastics is a big problem for our environment at the moment and we need to fix it."

Ms Hyland described micro-plastics as "harmful in all ways".

"I had to evaporate all of the water and sieve down all of the sediment two or three times just to look at them underneath the microscope," she said.

"You can't see them so the fish don't know what they're eating when they eat them."

Ms Hyland said her project showed that micro-plastics are present in the water in Goulburn, which means residents are consuming them.

"We're drinking the micro-plastics," she said.

"It's a problem all the way around."

The Young Scientist Awards Program celebrates the scientific investigations, technological innovations, and mathematical inquiries of NSW students.

The program encourages students to undertake innovative projects and investigations to find creative solutions to real-world problems.

"I hope to continue on the project and make it bigger and more well known, and to analyse it a bit more," Ms Hyland said.

"I started to look at the soil around the river and the banks. I did start to analyse that and start to look at it but I would like to do it a bit more in-depth. That would mean taking more samples from more locations and looking at it as a whole."