How can tech help address the issue of plastic pollution in rivers ?
Plastic pollution is a problem that affects all aquatic ecosystems. Most of the macro-waste found in the ocean or on beaches comes from inland and is transported by rivers. This waste originates mainly from cities, agricultural and industrial activities, recreation, or from treatment plant discharges during major weather events.
Pollution in rivers can be studied according to different types of indicators: floating flows, but also the amount of litter items washed up along the banks. Indeed, once introduced into the environment, part of the waste will transit directly to the estuary, but most of it will reach the shore and accumulate in retention areas, polluting the ecosystem and fragmenting into smaller plastic pieces.
With the Plastic Origins project, Surfrider identifies, alerts and takes action
The Surfrider Foundation Europe organization has been working on this issue since 2013. The NGO has developed a project combining sport, citizen mobilization and digital innovations: Plastic Origins. The goal is to collect data on macro waste washed up along river banks to identify accumulation areas and the most affected territories. Once identified, Surfrider’s goal is to alert the communities concerned and help them implement solutions to tackle the problem at source. This data will also be used to show the importance of monitoring this pollution and to move the regulations on this subject. From waste, to data, to local action: Surfrider stands as an actor of monitoring and action at the European level for cleaner and more protected rivers, by cutting off at source plastic pollution.
Citizen science and digital tools to build a trash Database
In France only, there are 74 rivers, 416 streams, 1714 canals and 1288 torrents. Collecting data internally at Surfrider on all the European rivers is an impossible mission. To collect a maximum of data, two levers have been activated: citizen science, which consists in mobilizing the involvement of citizens in data collection; and digital tools, which allow centralizing, analyzing and managing much information.
Monitoring is done via a mobile application, Plastic Origins, used by river users, outdoor enthusiasts and professionals. The principle is simple: directly from water (kayaking for example), or walking along the banks, the user is geolocated and reports the litter items he or she observes. The trash points (a trash point = a piece of trash geolocated thanks to the GPS coordinates of the phone) are then associated to a river and can be projected on a map to identify accumulation areas and launch alert and action processes in consultation with the communities. This methodology makes it possible to gather precise data on a defined river section and raises the user’s awareness of the degradation of the environment explored.
Thanks to our mobile application and methodology, we then manage the full lifecycle of the trash data identified. First we collect with the app both semi-structured and unstructured data. Then we store this data within our Database and Data Lake for further processing. We use an ETL to process user manual records of trash as well as video that needs to be analysed automatically by our Artificial Intelligence. Finally we’ll serve the results of our analytics on the Plastic Origins public website and on a map to visualize pollution over the territory.
To obtain a larger volume of data on more significant sections, Surfrider has gathered a team of volunteers and experts for several years to develop an Open Source Artificial Intelligence called Surfnet, that can automatically detect trash on videos taken by the user. The detection and tracking system allows, in the same way, to provide a database of geolocated trash points.
A cutting-edge platform to scale global plastic pollution
We are an environmental NGO without internal digital skills that has surrounded itself with experts and volunteers to make the best technological choices and build a modern automated Data platform with AI, structured data with PostGreSQL, a datalake, BI, Analytics.
To learn more about Plastic Origins, visit https://www.plasticorigins.eu/.
