For the past couple years, certain ocean freighters hauling cars around the world have had small cameras perched on board. The devices diligently scan the watery expanse, looking for bobbing bits of plastic waste.
It’s part of a deal between Hyundai’s shipping arm and a nonprofit called The Ocean Cleanup, which is placing its custom debris-detecting smart cameras on vessels. Now, the organization is linking up with Amazon Web Services as it seeks to build that data into an AI-powered platform that tracks and predicts the movement of ocean plastic around the world.
While The Ocean Cleanup has spent much of its decade-plus existence building tools to pull trash out of oceans and the rivers that flow into them, it can be hard to know where to place that equipment to maximize its efficiency. Contrary to how it might sound, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and other similar sites are not giant islands of plastics that might be easily scooped up, Riccardo Farina, The Ocean Cleanup’s head of partnerships funding, said.
“[That] would make our job way easier,” Farina told Tech Brew. “But actually, it’s more like a soup of plastic, where plastic is very widespread over the area. And the challenge is to identify what we call hotspot areas—areas with the highest concentrations of plastic.”
New gadgets: Through its AWS partnership, the group will now have access to more AI capabilities, drones, flotation devices, and internet-of-things tech that will help it better track plastics, the group said in an announcement. The org will combine data from this project with data from the ship cameras and other in-house sources, as well as publicly available information, like weather patterns and current flows, to steer plastic-collection ships toward hotspots, Farina said.
Keep up with the innovative tech transforming business
Tech Brew keeps business leaders up-to-date on the latest innovations, automation advances, policy shifts, and more, so they can make informed decisions about tech.
“We have developed a system that has been proven to be continuously capable of harvesting large amounts of plastic from the ocean,” Farina said. “That’s the hardware solution. Now we’re focusing our efforts to improve the software.”
A new marine life detection system will help reduce the need for protected species observers, who watch for creatures near its cleanup operations 24 hours a day, the announcement said.
“When we harvest plastic, we also want to ensure we do not harm, in any way, marine life species,” Farina said. “We’re looking at building an AI platform with AWS, which will be automatized as much as possible…so we can allocate more resources to plastic harvesting.”
A big goal: The Ocean Cleanup, which employs about 200 people, claims to have removed 64 million pounds of trash from rivers and oceans as of July of this year. It was founded with the ambitious mission to remove 90% of global plastic pollution by 2040—and “keep this plastic from entering the environment again.” You can see a dashboard of the cleanup operations here.
“Technology has always been at the heart of The Ocean Cleanup,” Farina said. “The goal was the need to understand the problem, use data and science, then develop a technology that can solve it. So technology has always been, and will continue to be, at the heart of our operations.”