Can drones help to fight the plastic pollution of beaches around the world? Image source: Shutterstock (#581493733) by Nokuro.
Plastic Tide, a project by Peter Koehler and Ellie Mackay, aims at drawing an accurate picture of how much plastic ends up on our beaches. Using any store-bought drone, their free app provides a survey pattern flight path that will spot the plastic. The gathered images are then uploaded to Zooniverse, a scientific crowd-sourcing platform, for people to tag the plastic. With the data collected this way, they hope to create a program that can do all that by itself, and thus determine the level of plastic pollution on UK beaches at first, but also the rest of the world in the future.
Koehler and Mackay are cooperating with researchers at Imperial College who simulate the behavior of plastic in the water to find out where it ends up.
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