A resident living here in the 7-county metro area may go buy coffee and a pastry at their favorite local cafe. As they sip on their drink, they may look over their receipt, noticing that a couple of cents in sales tax have been allocated to the Scientific & Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). But what does that tiny tax actually mean?
Well, those pennies start their journey by being collected by the Scientific & Cultural Facilities District. They join their other penny friends, waiting to be distributed to nearly 300 SCFD-funded arts, culture, and science organizations, from local gems to the metro area’s largest cultural institutions. But it’s when grants are allocated that a penny’s adventure really begins: the possibilities are endless. The penny from your pocket could end up supporting free admission to a new exhibition, music classes, or in this case, it could even travel alongside a child to a local river in search of microplastics and eventually, to the ocean.
Boulder County’s Ocean First Institute (OFI) is a Tier III SCFD-funded partner. Its educational programming, research, and conservation projects inspire young minds to explore marine science and innovate new ways to understand and protect the ocean. Here in land-locked Colorado, that starts with supporting water research and conservation in our own backyard. For years, Ocean First Institute had focused on exposing Coloradans to sharks, as its CEO and Chief Scientist, Dr. Mikki McComb-Kobza, is a marine biologist with a focus on the biology, behavior, abundance, and movement of sharks. However, when Dr. McComb-Kobza saw an article with the headline “It’s Raining Plastics” about findings of microplastics in Colorado’s rainfall, she knew that Ocean First Institute had to do something.
Thus, the Microplastics Pollution Monitoring Project was born in 2019. The OFI team took students in their programming at Lyons High School out to local watersheds in search of microplastics and to their dismay, found them. Since then, the classroom-based citizen science program has grown to encompass 38 schools across the metro region, and students can participate for free thanks to SCFD funding.
Students in the project receive a primer on plastic pollution from rivers to oceans from OFI educators, with an emphasis on the pollution problems that exist in our own backyard and could ripple out as far as the ocean. Then, students walk to a watershed near their school, suit up in their waders, and collect water and sediment samples. During a follow-up session, students get the opportunity to look at their samples under microscopes and record data about any plastics that may be present. This data gets added to the Citizen Science database, where it is eventually analyzed by the OFI team in Florida to create an overall analysis of plastic pollution in the Denver metro area’s watersheds. So far, students have collected 1,000 water samples and have identified more than 5,000 microplastics. But the project doesn’t stop there.
Every year, students who have participated in the project can come together for the annual Microplastics Summit hosted by Ocean First Institute at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. There, students discuss their field experiences and findings, learn from sustainability experts, and work together to come up with solutions for plastic pollution. As a result, the participating students not only get to use the scientific method to analyze water samples and contribute their findings to a powerful database, but they also get to collaborate on individual ways they can respond to this issue, empowering them to get more involved with citizen science and conservation.
Want to see your SCFD pennies at work? The public is welcome to attend the upcoming Ocean First Institute Microplastics Summit on April 12, 2025 from 11:00 – 1:00 p.m. at Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Reserve your spot below! It’s amazing to see the wonder that can unfold in our community, sparking impacts in the Denver metro area and beyond with the help of this tiny tax.
