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Tag: WasteShark

Drones will clear our ocean trash

In 2014 Planet Earth produced 311 million tons of new plastic. 32% of it leaked into fragile ecosystems. 10-20 million tons reached the ocean, causing US$13 billion of environmental damage. California, Oregon and Washington alone spend $500 million annually clearing trash from their Pacific coastline.

WATER AND AIR, THE TWO ESSENTIAL

FLUIDS ON WHICH ALL LIFE DEPENDS,

HAVE BECOME GLOBAL GARBAGE CANS.

Jacques-Yves Cousteau

In some places, plastic microbeads outnumber plankton (a critical source of our oceanic food chain) by 26:1. The new generation of “biodegradable” plastics won’t solve this problem, because the conditions required for this to happen just do not exist in the ocean.

THE SEA, THOUGH CHANGED IN A

SINISTER WAY, WILL CONTINUE TO EXIST:

THE THREAT IS RATHER TO LIFE ITSELF.

Rachel Carson

The bitter commercial reality is that once trash reaches the open ocean it’s everybody’s problem… and nobody’s accountability. We need to stop trash reaching the ocean in the first place. But how?

The systemic, sustainable answer is four-dimensional.

We need to change human behavior, especially the pattern of “consume and dispose”.

We need to become more efficient producers; not “producing more, quicker”, but using better input materials for production, materials that can be completely recycled or perfectly decomposed at zero harm to the ecosystem.

We need to extract the trash that is already in the deep ocean.

We need to catch trash that is close to land before it is carried out to ocean by tide, current and wind.

Points 1-3 above are long-term change projects. Point 4 is a quick win; an opportunity to make instant improvement. Autonomous drones offer a low-cost, high-effectiveness approach to catching marine litter. A drone can operate 24/7 (trash does not keep regular working hours) in hostile conditions, and can do work that living beings cannot, or should not be compelled to, do. When your drone is also a learning machine, then a team of drones becomes a responsive, self-organizing swarm – an autonomous net to patrol your inland waters and catch waste before it harms the ocean ecosystem.

WE KNOW THAT WHEN WE PROTECT OUR

OCEANS, WE’RE PROTECTING OUR

FUTURE.

Bill Clinton

This is the future: autonomous drones clearing marine litter, while humans – and all species – just live, thrive and have fun! Technology at work, serving the sea.

OLIVER CUNNINGHAM is a sci-fi geek and futurist. He makes drones that swim around cities, eating marine plastic and keeping our seas beautiful.

Sources: Ellen MacArthur Foundation at the 2016 World Economic Forum; the United Nations; The Guardian; The Telegraph; www.plasticoceans.org

WasteShark is an aquatic drone with a taste for floating garbage

Just when you thought it was safe to throw trash in the water, some smart South African entrepreneur comes along and invents WasteShark: an aquatic drone with a taste for garbage. Currently being trialed at the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, WasteShark is essentially an autonomous Roomba vacuum cleaner for the sea. Coming in two different sizes, and using an assortment of smart sensors, it can intelligently trawl waterways while munching more than 400 pounds of trash.“With a smart vacuum cleaner, the aim is to sweep up dust the whole time so you never have to see it,” creator Richard Hardiman told Digital Trends. “With these drones, the idea is that they constantly clean up the water so you never see a buildup of waste. The more you do that, the less waste sinks to the bottom and ultimately gets swept out into the ocean.”Hardiman said that he started his WasteShark project to create a device capable of keeping waters clean 24/7, regardless of weather conditions. “I didn’t want to invent a robot which takes away jobs,” he said. “Coming from Africa, the last thing I wanted was to increase unemployment for people. But I did want to make something with the ability to improve our lives, by carrying out a job that couldn’t be done efficiently by people.”

Early on, he explained that the idea for WasteShark was to use computer vision to spot floating trash. “Unfortunately, water and image sensing is a tough combination, since the reflection and refraction of light in the water makes it very difficult to identify objects,” he said. “As a result, we had to go back to the drawing board.”

What he eventually came up with is arguably even smarter than that, since the drone can learn its physical environment. Users are able to specify geo-fenced areas the robot sticks to, but within these it can learn where particular trouble spots are. “It slowly learns its environment by learning which places have had the highest build-up of trash, and [it can then] go back to that spot on the same tidal pattern or weather and wind patterns on subsequent days,” he said.

The current contract with the Port of Rotterdam lasts until next year, after which Hardiman said he will be ready to roll out the technology worldwide. In true shark movie sequel fashion, there’s even a larger WasteShark — capable of swallowing more than 1,000 pounds of garbage — in development. Hardiman is calling it the “Great WasteShark.”

“Long term, my strategy is to have autonomous drones like this in ports and highly trafficked water areas all over the world, much as you’ll have self-driving cars on the road,” he concluded.

Read the full article by Digital Trends article