Coral Restoration Foundation™ Plastic-Free Tree Design Challenge

The Coral Restoration Foundation™ is opening up a design challenge to Florida’s students, giving them the opportunity to win a state-of-the-art educational aquarium for their school, and have a hand in helping save coral reefs from extinction!

Our Coral Tree™ technology is the best design there is for growing huge quantities of endangered coral. With 500 Coral Trees™, across seven nurseries, in one year at the Coral Restoration Foundation™, we can grow and outplant more than 20,000 endangered corals back onto the Florida Reef Tract.

Now, we are enlisting the help of Florida’s students to help us take our work to the next level.

At the Coral Restoration Foundation™, we strive to ensure that all of our practices are as environmentally friendly as possible. But, our Coral Trees™ are made of plastic and, so far, we haven’t found a better design for growing the thousands of corals that we need to restore the reefs of the Florida Reef Tract.

A DESIGN CHALLENGE FOR FLORIDA'S STUDENTS

If we are going to have a chance of saving the world’s coral reefs, one of the things we need to do is keep plastic out of the ocean. We are working to develop plastic-free versions of our Coral Trees™, but we know that more heads are always better than one and that young minds have incredibly creative, often surprising, ways of solving problems.

So, we are throwing open a design challenge to Florida’s students, to see if they can help us design a “Plastic-Free” Coral Tree™!

We have developed an activity-packed curriculum to help them do it. Using the Coral Restoration Foundation™ learning labs, students will be introduced to the scientific principles behind our world-leading reef restoration methodologies. With an understanding of these principles, students will be able to use their ingenuity and unique perspectives to create a design that could be used to help rescue our planet’s coral reefs from extinction.

This educational package is enriched with the help of 5Gyres, the internationally-recognized authorities on the plastic pollution crisis.

WIN THE "THINK TANK"

The winning design will be built and installed in one of our Coral Tree Nurseries™ for further testing. But that’s not all. The winning class will be awarded a state-of-the-art educational aquarium, the “Think Tank”, donated by Titan Aquatic Exhibits in association with Titan Composites, Reef Brite, Neptune Systems, and ESHOPPS. The Think Tank will be accompanied by an educational curriculum from Healthy Aquatics Marine Institute that will allow students to learn from and maintain the aquarium, giving their school a permanent resource that will enrich their understanding of marine ecosystems and ocean conservation.

The Think Tank will even house a mini version of the students’ winning Plastic-Free Tree, hung with fragments of Acropora corals.

ENTER THE CHALLENGE

Classes can submit their Plastic-Free Tree designs to the Coral Restoration Foundation™ through our website. The deadline for entries to the Coral Restoration Foundation™ Plastic Free Tree Design Challenge is February 11th, 2019, National Inventors Day! The designs will then be evaluated by world-leading experts from the Coral Restoration Foundation™ team. The winning design will be announced on March 22nd, 2019, World Water Day.

CORAL RESTORATION FOUNDATION™

Coral Restoration Foundation™ is the world's largest non-profit marine-conservation organization dedicated to restoring coral reefs to a healthy state, in Florida and globally. Their core mission is to restore coral reefs, to educate others on the importance of our oceans, and to use science to further coral research and coral reef monitoring techniques.

Through large-scale cultivation, outplanting and monitoring of genetically diverse corals, Coral Restoration Foundation™ works to support the reefs’ natural recovery processes. Coral Restoration Foundation™ engages and empowers others in the mission with dive programs, educational activities, scientific collaborations, and outreach.

[richardmarsh]

For a plastic free coral tree all you have to do is substitute bamboo for the plastic parts. This would be easier than using plastic. Let me know how many you need.