Expanding plastic waste dumps can now be mapped from the area thanks to a new satellite imagery tool and synthetic intelligence, in what is considered a world first.
Whether you’re burning trash on a Sri Lankan beach or an Indonesian leaking into a river, Global Plastic Watch (GPW) can stumble upon objects as small as five to five meters and provide them on an interactive global map of plastic in almost real form. time.
“It’s not about naming and humiliating,” but about “empowering governments” with data to solve the problem, explained Fabien Laurier, GPW’s key architect.
The loose public tool, fully funded by Australia’s Minderoo Philanthropic Foundation, is designed to help prevent plastic from being dumped into the ocean. “Applause” through the United Nations.
“It’s hard what can’t be measured” or even located, Kakuko Nagatani-Yoshida of the United Nations Environment Programme told Sky News. He hopes governments will use “state-of-the-art” generation to decrease “open-air dumping and waste combustion. “
Indonesian Minister Ibu Nani Hendiarti said they had already used GPW to track undocumented or illegal sites. Indonesia is the fifth largest contributor to ocean plastics.
Every minute of one and both days, the equivalent of a truck loaded with plastic waste enters the world’s oceans, killing some 100,000 marine mammals a year.
Identification of plastic waste sites “is completely new”
Laurier, a former weather adviser to then-U. S. President Barack Obama, said plastic pollutants are “one of the greatest environmental crises of our time,” posing “enormous environmental and human health problems. “
Although a similar procedure is already widely used to track deforestation, knowledge about plastic sites is based on models and estimates.
“Identifying debris sites in satellite imagery is completely new and a very complicated thing to do, [even] on a small scale,” Caleb Kruse, a senior knowledge scientist at GPW, said on a video call from Berkeley, California.
Many of the well-known sites are perfectly managed, while others spit out waste.
Kruse’s team taught synthetic intelligence to comb through the European Space Agency’s satellite photographs in search of the “donable” features of plastic sites, adding a access road for heavy cars and gray-brown textured spaces that look like piles of debris.
“Huge” scale of some sites
“You can see it’s almost like an avalanche of garbage [seeming] to go straight into this river,” he said.
To give a concept of the “huge” scale of the site, he pointed the cursor at a space on the other side of the river, tiny for the spread of grayish-brown garbage.
Just a quantity of trash “the length of a house” “can be substantial,” he said.
Once identified, the location is checked through a qualified reviewer and checked against other datasets to signal precautionary symptoms, such as proximity to streams or people, or whether the type of soil makes plastic more likely to flow into the water.
“What’s crazy is that we have sites like this everywhere,” Kruse said, as he displayed one symbol after another of landfills.
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Global waste hot spots
The interactive has known many waste sites in 26 countries, accounting for more than 80% of the plastic in the world’s waterways.
Many of these countries will deal with waste that has been exported through other countries, as well as their own. The UK sends more than a part of its year of plastic waste. Western countries also have their own “problems” with landfills, he said.
The GPW procedure is being reviewed for publication in a clinical journal.
Kruse is clear that the tool is “the definitive dataset on plastic waste,” but hopes that governments, NGOs and communities can use it as a starting point.
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