How Satellites Can Help Fight Plastic Pollution in Our Oceans

With 8 million tons of plastic estimated to enter our oceans every year, Earth observation scientists have turned to satellites and artificial intelligence to more efficiently detect plastic pollution in the waters.

The team, from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the UK, say this is the first successful study using satellites to detect batches of ocean plastic. For the study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, the scientists looked at four coastal sites: the Gulf Islands in Canada, Scotland’s east coast, and the coastal waters off Da Nang, Vietnam and Ghana.

“Plastic pollution is a global issue,” says author Dr. Lauren Biermann. “This method will hopefully provide a stepping stone for satellites and drones to be used to tackle the marine plastics problem at the end of the product lifecycle. However, we will only ever make meaningful progress if we also tackle the source and reduce the amount of plastics produced.”

Using this research, the team plans to automate the steps of detecting and classifying the plastic, working on improving the reliability of the detection algorithms in more cloudy waters, and additionally gathering data from large rivers and tidal or turbid areas.