UNEP and Google partner to hunt for plastic pollution with machine learning Bangkok, 20 April 2021 – The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) today announced that it is working to fight plastic pollution using citizen science and machine learning, with technical advisory support from Google . With Google’s support, UNEP will create a new machine learning model that reveals a more detailed and accurate view of plastic pollution in the Mekong River. One of the main challenges of fighting plastic pollution is determining how exactly it enters – or “leaks” – into bodies of water. Working in the Mekong region from 2019-2020, UNEP’s CounterMEASURE project, with the support of the Geoinformatics Center (GIC) at the Asian Institute of Technology, developed techniques of assessing plastic leakage into the Mekong River using geospatial data and images of plastic waste supplied by researchers and volunteers.