Season 3, Episode 25 Sophia

Host John Whidden introduces a QuickFix from Janice in Calgary encouraging “no mow May” to protect invertebrates, then interviews Sophia, a third-year environmental engineering student focused on drinking water and microplastics. Sophia recommends boiling or filtering water and explains concerns about bottled water, including plastic-related endocrine disruptors and potential bacterial biofilms. She describes her microplastics research on how particle shape affects settling and treatment, noting flat plastics may slip through systems. Sophia also shares her youth transit advocacy, inspired by childhood mobility barriers, which helped make transit free for youth under 13 in Regina and expanded nationally. She discusses involving youth through leadership opportunities and funding strategies, reflects on awards and positivity in climate work, shares her own low-car lifestyle, and outlines steps for better, safer, more frequent transit systems.

00:00 Welcome to the Show

00:27 QuickFix No Mow May

01:25 Meet Sophia

02:03 Drinking Water Tips

03:49 Microplastics Explained

05:55 Reducing Plastic Pollution

07:27 Youth Transit Advocacy

10:41 Scaling Youth Climate Action

13:17 Awards and TEDx Impact

14:47 Staying Hopeful

15:46 Car Free Climate Action

16:10 Building Better Transit

19:01 Hope and Farewellhttps://video.igem.org/w/8QuTT9pE784FakJrccZLYB

https://chem-eng.utoronto.ca/news/igem-toronto-engineering-biology-for-global-impact/

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UPUWBpSS7po

https://www.fesplanet.org/

https://www.poparide.com/en-ca/

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Transcript

0:00

I'm Sophia, and welcome to Climate Action Figures. Hello, and welcome to another hope-filled episode of Climate Action Figures. My name is John Whidden, and this week on the show, you get to meet Sophia. But first, this week's Quick Fix, which comes to us from Janice in Calgary. Janice says, "No mow May to reduce your impact on invertebrates." Janice continues, "These tiny creatures are susceptible to early disruptions like mowing and raking." Well, thanks so much, Janice, and apologies as I left your suggestion until a little late in May, but maybe people can still, uh, avoid doing those things before they get looking after their lawns. Welcome, Sophia. What do you think about that Quick Fix? Hi. Thanks for having me. I think it's a pretty cool one, definitely out of my focus area, and something I would consider if I had a lawn. Yeah, a lot of people are going away from lawns these days, which is maybe even a better idea, right? I love gardens. It's one of my favorite activities. A friend of mine changed his whole front yard into garden so he had produce to share with his neighbors, and it was wonderful. That's what I did to my parents' backyard, so now it's all garden. Perfect. Now, Sophia, you are an environmental engineering student. How far are you into that program? I just finished my third year, so I'm going into my fourth and last year. Just finished exams? Yeah. So happy. Now, what kind of work is environmental engineering preparing you for? So environmental engineering is this intersection between protecting the environment and protecting public health. So I get to do a lot of things with regulations, making sure that people are safe from different types of industry, and also to make sure things like your water, your soil, and your air are up to different codes. So I'm looking towards a water specialization, like drinking water, so I'm really excited. Do you wanna give us a tip on drinking water, since that's your area of expertise? Drinking water is like a soup. You have a lot of different things inside that you can't see. So if you can boil your water or filter your water, those are additional ways that you can protect yourself. A lot of people buy their drinking water in the big bottles or small bottles, and there's so much plastic issue in that. What do you think about our drinking water, at least for those of us who are in Canada? Personally, I'm not a fan of bottled drinking water. There's two reasons why. The first reason is there's a lot of plastic. Those plastics create microplastics because the inside lining sheds, and those go into your body and they disrupt your hormones. So we call them endocrine disruptors. I research a lot of microplastics, so I get to see a lot of the res- the effects. So it's not necessarily something that I would want to expose myself to, especially 'cause it can affect fertility, so your ability to have kids. The second reason why I don't necessarily like drinking water in bottles is that they actually carry a lot of bacteria. It's really hard to go and sanitize these different drinking water containers properly so that you don't have a biofilm, which is a layer of bacteria on the inside layer, and that can potentially be something that could make you sick, or it could be something that puts more stress on your immune system. So again, I suggest you boil your water if you have a capacity to. I have two kettles at home, so I just pop two of them on, and it's just another layer of protection if that's something that you want. Plus it helps to get the chlorine taste out in your water if you're not a fan of that. I have to point out, of course, that I'm in a position of privilege, having drinking water that doesn't typically need to be treated. There are many places, even in Canada, where they do have to boil their water. So good advice to us there. Thanks, Sophia. Let's dig a bit deeper into that world of microplastics research that you're into. You've talked about water bottles. What other interesting things can you tell us about microplastics? Microplastics are everywhere, and currently we use a lot of plastic in our world. They break down into microplastics, and they break down into different shapes, so that's what I study. So you can have plastics that are round, or you can have plastics that are flat, and about 60% of the plastics are round, and slowly over time they become flatter. The reason why this is important, it affects how they settle inside our different lakes and rivers and what animals they affect. I guess that's kind of like my special interest area, is I look at all about how do we transport them in different systems, and how can we go and make sure that people are safer? So something really cool is that there's a lot of different research that's happening in this area to go and make sure that these plastics, as they break down over time, can go and better protect you and your health. So in your research, what have you found to be the worst types of plastic for breaking down and getting into our environment? I don't look too much at the different types of plastics per se, but I do look a lot at the shapes. So all our modeling systems are based around this idea that plastics are round. So that means that flat plastics, which tend to take a longer time to settle out, actually don't get as much treatment capacities as these round plastics. So those are the plastics that are most likely to slip through and something that you will go and experience. So is the round plastic more three-dimensional? Is that the idea? It's just more that they're easier to model. So we do all our predictions that basically everything is round, and we apply a safety factor and hope it's good. I think we can be a little bit more precise, but again, it's an emerging contaminant, so we're still learning more as time goes on. And the flat plastic, because there's more surface area, takes longer to get to the bottom- Yes and settle. Yes. It's surface area dependent, so it takes longer, has more drag force. Okay. So like kind of think a piece of paper that's crumpled up will go down faster than a piece of paper that's flat. It will kind of sway as it goes down. Right. So what would you say are the best ways that we can avoid harmful microplastics in our environment? Ooh, that's a good question. I think the first one is to use less plastic. The less plastic we use, the less source plastic that's going into the environment, and having really good waste management solutions. So when you have your plastic, where does it go? If we can go and then contain it to reuse and recycle as much of it as possible, that's a lot less plastic that's just kind of going out into the environment with no one doing anything. And then, of course, afterwards, once it's in the environment, using different solutions to go help treat it. So something really cool is I am a mentor for a team in Toronto, they're called iGEM Toronto, and they're working on a technology to go and remove microplastics from the environment using bacteria. So there's a lot of really interesting solutions that we can have to remove plastics, and employing those would definitely be something that's useful. My understanding, Sophia, has been that the cheaper plastics, the thinner plastics tend to break down more easily or tend to get out into the environment, like let's say a single-use plastic bag or something like that. Is that generally true? I would have to double-check that, but from my understanding, yes. Um, just because when they're, again, more film-like, they tend to break down because they're thinner. There's less molecular weight holding them together. So when you're considering the impact of the sun, it's much easier to break these short chain molecules than really long chain molecules. So anything that's short chain, be it that or very brittle plastics as the sun hits it, um, that will go and break down a little bit easier. Going into a different area of study for you, you have used research, policy, and design to build more sustainable and equitable communities. Can you tell us a little more about that? Yeah. So this is kind of one of my favorite things. I like to say that I am a leader by kindness. So when I was little, I really struggled to get around the community, and that's because my dad was, um, temporarily paralyzed from the back down, and it was really hard on my family. My mom couldn't bring me to school, and that was the first time that I realized that transportation barriers rob youth of opportunities, friendships, and dreams. At first, I just thought it was a me issue, but when I went to high school, I realized I wasn't alone, that there's so many kids from different backgrounds who are struggling to get around our communities. So that's something that I wanted to change. So I went and I spoke to Regina City Council. I actually recited a slam poem, and I basically told them that there needs to be better mobility options for youth. And that led to me to be on the Energy and Sustainability Framework, which is Regina's plan to reach near net zero emissions by 2050. Also, just to kind of go and work in the community, create a group called Better Bus Youth, and as a result of this, transit was made free for all youth under the age of 13, which helps 36,000 kids in Regina. And now they do that nationally, so now that's 300,000 kids in about 40 different communities that have free transit. Wow. Congratulations on that Yeah. Thank you. You've invested a lot of energy into youth transit advocacy. You've s- talked about what got you started in that. What keeps you moving in that? What inspires you about that particular area? The difference that mobility makes in people's life. We see so often that when people don't have access to mobility, it's like their entire life and their support system shuts down. So when a kid can go to school, when they're able to work and gain financial freedom, when they're able to volunteer or be parts of things like sports and build a sense of independence and confidence, the farther they're able to go in their life, and there's so much research that goes in and supports this. We saw that in Kingston when kids had free transit passes, they had used 86,000 trips to go on different cultural experiences, and school absences reduced by 16,000. So there's just so many benefits, and I even see it, like, from random kids that I meet where they talk about, "Oh, I can go see my mom, and I can just go and jump on the bus," or, "I can visit my grandma." And it's easy for them to go around and see different people, and that's something that I want to see more of in our communities. Sophia, you've mentioned once about kindness, and clearly in several of your answers you're thinking about other people all the time. Where did you get that in your life? Where does that come from? I think it came a lot from, like, my different teachers when I was little. John, you're a teacher, and I think you always know that teachers are some of the first people that goes and supports youth and show them, you know, your voice matters. People want to see you succeed, and people are willing to go and give you the resources to get there. And just having those teachers in my life to say, you know, "We want to see you go farther," is just kind of what taught me I wanna be like them. So that's definitely my biggest motivation. Well, we'll always take a shout-out to teachers on this program. Sophia, you also build programs that scale, for example, securing $30,000 for two national youth transit initiatives with Small Change Fund and helping grow Civil Connect into a 60-member student design team supporting Alberta communities. What are ways that we can get youth involved in climate action like you have? I think the biggest way is we give them opportunities to go and be leaders in their communities. I do a lot of research with the government of Saskatchewan on distributive leadership, and that is one of the best ways to go ensure better public health. So when we go and help to give kids access to funding, when we make them aware that there's actually a lot of funding out there for youth to run their own programs, when we give them opportunities to go and be leaders in their communities to get other youth involved, and also mention that it can relate to their futures with their degrees, it really can help them to just take the next step. And see that I can go and make a difference in my community, and I don't have to wait till I'm 40 or 50 years old to start. And you mentioned funding. That can always be a challenge in, uh, putting these groups together, getting the funding for them. There will be people listening or watching the podcast who are wondering, "How do we do that?" That's one of the hardest, uh, parts. Do you have any advice for them? So when I started, I had no monies. I basically went to other people that I knew, and I saw if I could find funding through them. So my teachers were the big first funders of my projects, and I'm so grateful to them. I went and I asked different people in my religious communities and my neighbors. And you can do fundraising that way, same way that you almost do with a sports team, bottle drives. There's also other ways to go through different organizations. For example, schools often have some money for different school-related activities. So if you do something with a club, maybe you can find a little bit of money there. And there's also a lot of money inside the community to go and build things up. So almost every city has some form of a neighborhood grant. So if you're doing a project in a community, for example, like gardening or something like that, you can get a 500 to like $1,500 grant to go and help you start. Same thing that there's a lot of different national awards and international awards, like Finance Engage Sustain. They have an award called the Youth Harvard Action Grant. That's the one that I got. It was $30,000 to go and build up a library about how to be a transit advocate, and also just like a general good advocate in your life and to make it totally free. So there's a lot of money out there to go and help youth start their own initiatives too. You just have to keep looking. Well, we'll definitely include some of those in the show notes so that people can access those if they need to. So you mentioned scholarships. You have earned the TD National Scholarship, the Terry Fox Humanitarian Award, National Youth Climate Action Award, Canada's Top 25 Environmentalists Under 25. We have too many accolades to get into all of them, but, uh, what has been the biggest benefit from receiving those awards? The biggest benefit of those awards is how I get to recognize everyone who's been part of these different movements. Now, I know on the show there's just me, but with me, there's 60 other youth and so many different mentors and intergenerational advisors that are there to go and help support. So when I get an award, it's a way that I almost get to go and say thank you to everyone else, that the work that we're doing is so meaningful, and it also helps to go and give our cause more legitimacy. So now I get to go and talk to you about, "Hey, this is what transit is, and this is what microplastics is." And people get to see, oh, there's some depth behind it. And it's also been able to give me a lot of really cool opportunities. Like I did a TEDx talk in Regina, and you'll see the picture on the screen if you're watching on YouTube. But it's just all those different opportunities like that or meeting the mayor. It's just really nice opportunities to go and let different decision-makers know and also just general community members know that- They have power in their actions, and we can just bring the community that much farther together. Can our audience check out that TED Talk? Oh, absolutely, they can check it out. I think it's called A Youth Advocate's Story of Courage and Change. And we'll put that in the show notes as well. We've talked about some heavy topics so far, you know, from environment to trying to make transit more equitable to everyone. You seem very positive ab- about these things. How do you keep that positive energy and attitude? Yeah, that's a good question because so often when we're doing climate work, there's this really heavy sense of anxiety and grief. What I like to remember, though, is that the more people that knows what we're doing and they see a path forward, the faster we are at working towards our goals. Like, if you think a couple years ago, the world was supposed to be rapidly change that there is no way that we can ever come back. But with how many people started to mobilize around it and see it as important, we were able to push it a couple years. And this just goes to show that when we have that positivity, when we put the resources towards it, we can go and make that change. And the first step starts with us and what we're willing to do to go and make that a reality. And you seem to do a lot in terms of taking steps, and so let's segue right into the climate action that you've chosen to share with us today. So I don't have a car. I love to take transit. I ride my bike, and I walk a lot. So I walk about 40 minutes every day, and it's a great way to have exercise, but also to take in some nature and just kind of give back to the environment a little bit. And since we've talked about transit and it's close to your heart, I have to ask, y- you know, it's the cart before the horse kind of thing. If there's a lousy transit system in a city, people won't use it. So how do we get those transit systems built out so that they work well and then people want to use them? That's such a great question. The first part of it is that you need to increase the frequency of transit. You need to make reliable transit, and you also need to make transit that is safe and affordable. And the first way that starts is by having community members to go and say, "This transit system is not working. Here's how it's not working." And by having that community voice to go and come in to say, "Here's how we can make services better," and by, say, offering different incentives to the communities to go and build the habit of them riding transit, then we can start progressively making services better as a community. So civic action, essentially. Civic action, as well as decision-makers who are willing to be responsive and find funding from different sources, not just from the municipalities, 'cause they have a lot of burden on them, but also the province and federally. And you're in Alberta, where people tend to love having their own vehicle and having the freedom to drive anywhere they want. Yeah. And that's not part of your world, but how can we get that message across that we don't have to drive everywhere all the time? So when you look at our communities, right, especially those that were built in the '70s and the '80s, they were all based around the automobile. So we had all these suburban neighborhoods with one entrance and one exit, and you had all these big mega highways that if you were, like, a person, it's very difficult for you to cross without a car. But once we start utilizing different resources we have, like transit, like biking, like even car sharing, sharing with other people and riding with them, we start to see that there needs to be less reliance on cars and less infrastructure made specifically for cars. And as a result, we can start making communities that are focused on people. So I think the first step is realizing the little things that we can do to go and rely less on a car, and how ultimately that allows us to go shift our environment so we can go and have more community closer to each other. And since you brought it up, I'm gonna plug, uh, w- this is a not-for-profit podcast, as most people realize, so we don't have advertising. But I just used an app that I loved, and I don't think I've mentioned it on the program. It's called Poparide. P-O-P-A-R-I-D-E. Poparide. Say you wanna go from Edmonton to Calgary. You enter that and someone will get in touch with you, someone who's been vetted and is a safe driver, and then you connect with them and you decide, "Yeah, I'm gonna ride with this person," and you get charged a certain amount that's much less than a typical bus fare. And, uh, so we get more people into fewer vehicles. So just a little plug for Poparide. That's awesome. Last question for you today, Sophia. What gives you hope? What gives me hope is to see so many people interested in making a difference. And when we go and we build the knowledge in people's head, the passion in people's heart, and the skills in their hands, they are so willing to go and make a change and to work together towards it So I would just invite everyone here to go and kind of learn what you're passionate about. Go and find other people who are knowledgeable in it, and go bring people in. Even if they may not necessarily understand what you're doing, they're more than happy to learn once you're patient with them, and you just start kind of working together to see how their priorities actually work with your priorities. Well, in the introduction today, Sophia, I said welcome to another hope-filled episode, and little did I know how much hope you were gonna provide us with. So thanks so much for being with us today and doing that. Yeah, thank you so much. This has been really fun. And thank you, dear listener and viewer. We'd love to hear from you, so if you have something to say about what you've heard here today, please share it with us. Drop us a line via social media or email. We're at climateactionfigures@gmail.com. We will be back again next week, same time, same place, to hear from another climate action figure. Until then... Go figures. This has been Climate Action Figures. Our show is produced and hosted by John Whidden. Our creative consultant is Kayla McIntosh. Our theme song is Hawaii Vacation by To varied. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube at Climate Action Figures. That's all one word. And if you have any other questions or comments that arose from this or any episode, feel free to reach out to us at climateactionfigures@gmail.com. And thank you for listening. We'll be back next week with another climate action figure.