SANTA CRUZ — A UC Santa Cruz student recently won a competition for her invention of a microplastics-eating turtle named PETER.
Gabriella Pleasant, 26, won the Techstars Student Startup Pitch Competition at the Consumer Electronic Show, an annual global technology exhibition held Jan. 7-10 in Las Vegas. Pleasant is a fourth-year student at UC Santa Cruz studying computational linguistics.
Pleasant’s self-funded invention PETER stands for Polyethylene terephthalate (abbreviated PET) Eating Robot. Polyethylene terephthalate is the chemical name for polyester and is a clear, strong lightweight plastic used for packaging food and beverages. PETER is referred to as a “she” or “her.”
Pleasant is in the research and development phase and is now starting construction on a prototype, which she expects to complete within six months, Pleasant said. She expects to have three prototype sizes. In PETER’s latest design, she swallows microplastics, which are pieces of plastic smaller than 5 millimeters — slightly more than a fourth of the size of a penny. The microplastics then go to her stomach, which is made of an enzymatic mesh that breaks the microplastics down from polymers to monomers through chemical reactions. PETER “poops” out the broken-down material as organic matter back into the ocean. PETER is entirely made of chitosan, a fibrous substance taken from the skeleton of shellfish, Pleasant said.
In the robot’s 30-day lifetime, the goal is for one PETER to break down 12 particles per cubic meter in a range of 1,360 cubic meters of contaminated water in its 30-day lifetime, Pleasant said. For comparison, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is about 1.6 million square kilometers in size, according to a 2018 CNN report. By the end of the 30 days, PETER will be completely broken down into organic material, Pleasant said. She is designing PETER to have a shorter lifespan because if a fish swallows PETER, she doesn’t want the fish to die. In other words, she wants PETER to be able to interact with the environment and not harm it. Having a shorter-term product also minimizes the damage that a longer-term product would cause when the environment can no longer support it, she said.
“There’s room in the market for a lot of solutions in microplastics,” said Emma McLaren, Pleasant’s coach and adviser.
Pleasant said she wants to make PETER trackable for its owner to see its location. She hopes when PETER is commercialized, each consumer can choose where in the ocean they want to put their PETER. The robot will have an emotional element because consumers will feel they are doing their part to clean the places they love, McLaren said. PETER still has to be able to move with the currents, Pleasant said, to follow the microplastics’ movement.
Pleasant first presented PETER in October at UCSC’s Slug Tank, the university’s student business pitching contest. Pleasant won the Most Innovative award at UCSC’s Slug Tank, the university’s student business pitching contest.
“I couldn’t have imagined that I’d get this much support for my prototype,” Pleasant said. “I’ve been working on it for two years. And I’ve been told ‘no, no, no, no, no, no, no.’ And then it wasn’t until the first time I pitch that I actually received positive feedback on it.”
McLaren, who has a degree in marine management and has transitioned her work to mentoring local startups, became Pleasant’s mentor after seeing her pitch at Slug Tank. “That’s one of the things that we have in common, that we relate, is that it doesn’t require a degree in engineering or science or whatever to come up with a good idea and make it work,” McLaren said.
Before Pleasant came up with the idea for PETER, she ran two startups: an online clothing store and a coffee roasting company. In October, Pleasant started her company Pleasant Robotics, now focusing on PETER. “I’d like to stick with her,” Pleasant said.
