Litter survey leads to roll-out of new bins across BCP bournemouthecho.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from bournemouthecho.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
UK startup uses drones to map plastic pollution msn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from msn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Whether it s lack of bins or laziness, post-lockdown litterbugs must assume that someone else will clean it up: city workers or environmental fanatics perhaps. But how about drones?
Twenty plastic-busting inventions to clean our rivers and seas
From plastic-devouring machines to watchful drones, these technologies are helping tackle plastic pollution in the ocean
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Plastic waste collected in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by a prototype boom (Image: The Ocean Cleanup)
There’s an incomprehensible amount of plastic in the ocean – estimates put the known total at 5 trillion individual pieces, or around 150 million tonnes. An additional 8 million tonnes finds its way into the ocean every year. That’s only increased thanks to Covid-19 and the resulting surge in single-use items like masks and gloves.
Most plastic enters the ocean via rivers, which carry vast amounts of waste from inland sources. Once in the ocean, plastic is broken down by the sun’s rays and by wind and waves, eventually transforming into smaller fragments called microplastics. But the hardy nature of the material means that this process can take hundreds of years. In the meantime,
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A pilot scheme in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) in the United Kingdom will see drones used to help councils reduce litter.
BCP Council is partnering with the environmental charity Hubbub, startup Ellipsis Earth and fast food brand McDonald’s – which is funding the trial – to use drone data to inform the placement of bins, street cleaning schedules and behaviour change campaigns around litter.
The partners have called the pilot “the most scientifically robust litter survey ever undertaken in the UK”.
Drone imagery is processed by Ellipsis Earth software to automatically and rapidly detect discarded litter items and quantify them by type and brand to create litter heatmaps. This data, along with expert analysis and recommendations, will be shared with BCP council, Hubbub and McDonald’s, to help them better understand and prevent littering.