My Sister Is Working to Expose Microplastics

Isabella Garry, pictured at one of her favorite Twin Cities parks, is an innovative middle school student who developed the Enviro app. Photo Sarah Whiting

Have you ever eaten a credit card? This may seem like an absurd question, but in reality, the average person consumes the rough equivalent of a credit card’s worth of plastic every week. That totals nearly half a pound per year, mostly through microplastics and nanoplastics — tiny plastic particles or liquid plastic ingredients found in everyday items such as makeup, toothpaste, laundry detergent, and even clothing.

These invisible plastics can seep through our skin and enter our bloodstream, and have been linked to hormonal imbalances, cancer, and organ damage. When my younger sister Isabella learned about this at nine years old, she took action, and Enviro was born.

Isabella developed the first version of Enviro through the Technovation Challenge, a global tech competition for girls. I had the privilege of being Isabella’s mentor throughout the process. My role was to guide her in app development, research, and the pitch process, but it was her passion for environmental health and social impact that truly brought the idea to life. I was her sounding board to brainstorm features, refine the problem statement, and explore solutions to help people avoid nanoplastics in their everyday purchases.

The result was a functional app that can scan a product’s barcode, check it against a database of ingredients, and alert the user to any nanoplastics it contains.

The project resonated so much with international audiences that she was chosen to represent America at the World Summit Technovation Challenge in San Francisco, where she pitched her app to Silicon Valley executives. She gained confidence in public speaking and persuaded audiences with her storytelling and ideas.

From 2023 to 2024, she learned about coding and UI/UX design, but also about user needs, data sourcing, and the intricacies of ingredient labeling. One of the biggest challenges Isabella faced was building a custom barcode and ingredient database. Commercial API access was costly, so she had to build her dataset from scratch.

She also discovered through a community survey that users wanted to know more than simply if a product was “bad.” They were looking for alternative products, transparency about ingredients in all consumer brands, and better consumer product education. Based on that feedback, Isabella added features — after extensive research — that include healthier product recommendations, ingredient explanations, and visual indicators (like red highlights for nanoplastics).

Currently, as a middle school student, Isabella is working to improve the app infrastructure so that it can be launched to the public. This includes ongoing research to expand the database by a few hundred products, enhance scan accuracy, and develop a browser extension for alternatives in online shopping.

We plan to build a website with an extension to support online shopping for users, to empower millions of Americans with their decisions as consumers. We are also passionate about making ingredient transparency equitable, ensuring that individuals from all communities can access the information they need — with user-friendly terms rather than scientific names — to protect their health, understand side effects, recognize environmental impacts, and select more skin-friendly options.

In the next 10 years, we hope to continue working together — combining our interests in technology, science, and social impact to build tools that help people make informed decisions, especially regarding health and the environment, whether through Enviro or other platforms.

Importantly, we still make time for fun. I go to college at Yale University, and Isabella will start seventh grade this fall, yet we FaceTime every day, catch up on each other’s days, hold each other accountable, and learn together as we keep building projects.

Working on Enviro has taught us that solving real-world problems doesn’t require sacrificing creativity or curiosity; in fact, it’s often at the intersection of the two where real innovation occurs. With Enviro, we’re not just building an app, we’re fostering a movement for cleaner, safer living.

Isabella and Jasmine Garry are siblings — from a non-STEM family background — who each developed an interest in web development, apps, and games. Both have participated in the Technovation Challenge.

For more on the issue of microplastics, read a related story in The Guardian.