Extensive landfills of plastic waste can now be mapped from space thanks to a new tool that uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence in what is considered to be the world’s first.
From burning waste on a beach in Sri Lanka to an Indonesian river-penetrating site, Global Plastic Watch (GPW) can detect five-by-five-meter objects by presenting them on an interactive, almost real-time global plastic map.
“It’s not about naming and embarrassing, it’s about ’empowering governments’ with information to help tackle the problem,” said Fabien Lorie, a key GPW architect.
The free public instrument, designed to help stop plastic leaks into the ocean, has been “applauded” by the United Nations and is now being used by the Indonesian government, the fifth-largest contributor to plastic in the ocean.
“It’s hard to control what you can’t measure,” or even locate, “Kakuko Nagatani-Yoshida of the United Nations Environment Program told Sky News. She hoped that governments would use “cutting-edge” technology to reduce “plastic waste pollution and open waste dumping and incineration.”
Image: The street view function helps to check the objects and whether they release flowing plastic into the surrounding lands and waters. Photo: Maxar Technologies / Earthrise Media Image: Historical records show how this site in Bali, Indonesia, grew significantly between 2014 and 2021. Photo: Maxar Technologies / Earthrise Media
Indonesian Minister Ibu Nani Hendiarty said it had already been used to track undocumented or illegal sites.
Every minute of every day, the equivalent of a truckload of plastic garbage enters the world’s oceans, killing approximately 100,000 marine mammals each year.
Identification of plastic waste sites is “completely new”
Mr Lorie called plastic pollution “one of the greatest environmental crises of our time”, creating “huge problems for the environment and human health”.
“And when it reaches the ocean, it breaks down into nanolayers and essentially contaminates and contaminates the entire food chain,” he said.
Although such a process is already widely used to monitor deforestation, data on plastic sites are usually based on models and estimates.
“Identifying waste sites in satellite imagery is completely new and something that is very difficult to do at all, [even] on a small scale, “said Caleb Cruz, a leading scientist according to GPW, during a video call from Berkeley, California.
Many of the identified sites are perfectly managed, while others dispose of waste, the team said.
Image: There are no barriers between this site and the water, GPW. Photo: Maxar Technologies / Earthris Media Image: The team is looking for typical features to identify plastic waste sites. The houses provide a sense of scale. Photo: Maxar Technologies / Earthise Media
Mr Cruze’s team learned artificial intelligence to comb satellite images from the European Space Agency to “distribute” features on plastic sites.
Sharing a screenshot of a Java site, Mr. Cruz chose a path for garbage trucks, an entrance facility and gray-brown textured areas showing piles of waste.
“Huge” scale on some sites
“You see, it’s almost like an avalanche of waste [appears to be] it just flows into this river, “he said.
To give an idea of the “huge” scale of the site, he held the mouse cursor over a house across the river for a moment compared to the gray-brown litter.
Just the amount of house-sized waste “can be really significant,” he said.
Once identified, each location is checked by a trained reviewer and cross-referenced with other datasets to mark warning signs, such as proximity to waterways or people, or whether the soil type causes plastic leakage into the water. -probably.
Image: Photo: Global Plastic Watch / Maxar Technologies / Earthris Media Image: GPW has discovered hundreds of undocumented and illegal sites across Indonesia tagged here in clusters
“The crazy thing is that we find such sites everywhere,” Mr Cruz said as he displayed image-by-image waste on his screen.
World waste hotspots
The interactive website identifies hundreds of landfills in 26 countries, representing more than 80% of the world’s plastic waterways.
Many of these countries will recycle waste that has been exported from other countries as well as their own. The United Kingdom ships more than half of its plastic waste each year. Western countries also have their “problems” with landfills, he said.
The GPW-based process is under review for publication in a scientific journal.
Mr Kruse is clear about the fact that the tool is not a “plastic waste data set”, but he hopes that governments, NGOs and communities can use it as a starting point for improving waste hotspots, which first you have to cope.
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