Three students and friends from the Philippines Science and High School in the Central Visayas region invented a “portable water quality assessment tool” together in the tenth grade and filed a patent application under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) in 2022.
In 2021, Josefino Nino O. Ligan (Nino) and David Elijah Corsini S. Atup (David), then sixteen years old, regularly met with Chesney Daniel Galura Pepito (Chesney), who was fifteen, to play video games or exercise together, and during one of these meetings, they came up with the idea for the invention. They discussed the plastic debris that often covered the beaches near their school and began thinking about how they could solve the microplastic problem.
Knowing that plastic pollution is a global threat to biodiversity and that many families in their country depend on fishing for their livelihoods, they realized that it would be useful to have a portable device that could measure the amount of microplastics in the seawater at a particular beach. They decided to explore the idea and, in consultation with their mentor and teachers at school, develop it.