I love our ocean and I really want to protect it. I've witnessed in every village that we've seen a piece of cloth on a coral or a bottle stuck inside the branching corals or even plastic wrappers everywhere.

Plastic does travel all around the world and it doesn't always originate from somewhere, it comes from different places and it washes up on other people's beaches, and we've got to consider that when we use plastic. 

We've been working with scientists to sample the beaches and ocean of Samoa. We've heard of microplastics, we've studied microplastics but this is the first time we've actually identified the different microplastics that are on our beaches and also in our oceans, which is a very good experience for us. 

Out in the ocean we are using a modified Manta control device, so it's got a big mouth and wings to help it to float, and two nets that go out a couple of metres at the back. This second net allows us to capture microplastics down to 50 micrometres, these smaller microplastics.

We don't know much about their abundance in the ocean but it's important that we quantify these because they affect the smaller creatures in the ocean, which has effects further up the chain as well.

We got to be a part of an international microplastic seminar and we learned how important the data that we collect is going to be to inform policy. Your work and the evidence you produce, is very powerful because you can say, in this sea water sample, that's the content and based on that, when a country like Samoa puts forward projects for funding you can be funded because you've got the baseline evidence.

When we come to other places that feel the impact of this, the partnerships that the University of Newcastle have with other communities is really important. There's a lot of knowledge that we don't have. It's been really important for us to collaborate.

We've learned so much this has been a really beneficial program for both the University of Newcastle and Samoan scientists. This has been good capacity building for us in the future. 

I want our children to walk on sandy beaches, instead of plastic polluted beaches. We still got a long way to go to solving the plastic pollution crisis but this project brings us one step closer.