Help us send GOES water-testing filters — free — to schools and communities around the world.
Science shouldn’t depend on where you live or what you can afford
Plankton are the planet’s life-support system, and plastic is now found in water everywhere — from the rain and the rivers to the tap and the deep ocean. The more people who measure it, in more places, the clearer the picture becomes. But real scientific tools usually stay in the hands of universities and well-funded labs. We think that’s backwards. The people living beside a river, a coastline or a struggling water supply are exactly the ones who should be able to test it — and to see the results for themselves.
That’s what a GOES filter makes possible. It’s a simple, robust kit that lets anyone take a proper water sample, filter it, and photograph the plankton and microplastic it captures under a microscope. Every filter added to the network makes the global dataset richer, fairer and more complete.
What we’re offering
Free filters for schools and community groups. Any school or community project that commits to taking samples and sharing the data can receive a GOES filter at no cost. It turns a classroom or a local group into a real research station — and turns curiosity about pollution into evidence.
Subsidised filters for everyone else. For individuals and community projects who can contribute something, we keep the cost as low as we can, so price is never the reason someone can’t take part.
Free delivery, anywhere in the world. Our filters are made in a small workshop in Spain. We want to cover the shipping — from Spain to your school, your village or your harbour — wherever you are. A filter that never arrives helps no one, so getting them into people’s hands, worldwide, is part of the mission.
Why free and global matters
A dataset is only as good as the places it comes from. If only wealthy regions can afford to take part, the picture of our water is skewed and incomplete. By putting filters into schools and communities everywhere — including places rarely represented in ocean and water research — we build something genuinely global, and we hand the next generation the tools to understand the water around them.
What we do with your photographs
Every photograph you take is more than a picture — it’s data. When your five microscope images arrive, they go into the GOES image-analysis pipeline: software scans each one to identify and count what it finds — plankton, plastic fibres and beads, and other particles over 20 microns — and to measure their sizes. Crucially, it separates the real signal from background contamination from the kit and the air, which is why the clean-water "blank" samples matter so much. Every result is added to a central, open database, tagged with exactly where and when the sample was taken.
Thousands of individual samples then become one picture anyone can explore. Here is an example from our first survey — each point is a real water sample taken by a boat crossing the Equatorial Atlantic:
Example: interactive results from the GOES Equatorial Atlantic survey. Your samples, wherever you are, are added to the same growing picture.
Send us a sample for real analysis. The software is kept honest by real laboratory work. We also welcome physical samples sent in for detailed microscope and laboratory analysis, which we use to calibrate and cross-check the image-analysis pipeline. If you would like to contribute a sample for calibration, please get in touch through our Contact page.
How you can help
Every filter we give away, and every parcel we ship, is paid for by supporters who believe science belongs to everyone.
- Sponsor a filter — put a complete kit into the hands of a school or community group.
- Sponsor a classroom or a community — fund a small cluster of filters and the training to use them.
- Cover delivery — help us keep shipping free, from Spain to anywhere in the world.
- Partner with us — organisations and companies can fund filters at scale under their own name.
However you give, you’re not just funding equipment. You’re giving a school, a village or a coastal community the ability to measure their own water — and to add their piece to a worldwide picture of the water cycle.
Take part.
If you’d like to request a free or subsidised filter for your school or community, or to help fund filters and delivery for others, we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch through our Contact page.
GOES is a not-for-profit citizen-science survey.