Bloomberg’s Global Data Team Takes a Deep Dive into Ocean Data

“In God we trust. Everyone else, bring data” – Mike Bloomberg

Bloomberg was founded on the belief that bringing data-driven transparency to capital markets would make business more efficient. Our data science experts are now taking that enthusiasm for data-driven solutions combined with our passion for service, to team up with our non-profit partner Clean Ocean Action, helping them evaluate more than 30 years’ worth of debris data collected by thousands of volunteers. This week the Bloomberg team presented the project and their methodology at Clean Ocean Action’s Debris Free Sea Conference, celebrating the 30th anniversary of their Beach Sweeps to over 150 attendees, including environmental scientists, non-profits, student, volunteers, and government officials.

For 30 years, Clean Ocean Action has been teaming up with citizen volunteers to clean the beaches of New Jersey through their statewide ‘Beach Sweeps’ program. Volunteers are asked to not only clean up debris from coastal sites, but along the way they are tasked with recording each trash item that is collected on a paper card. Clean Ocean Action provided this data to a team of volunteers in our Princeton office.  The data set includes the garbage and debris records from Beach Sweeps held throughout the state since 1975. In the past 20 years alone, over 100,000 volunteers have collected data on over 5.19 million pieces of trash found on the Jersey Shore.

Employees combed through boxes of spreadsheets of coastal trash & debris data at a recent datathon held in the Princeton office where the data was normalized and entered into a custom web app built by group of Global Data employees during the Princeton “Codefest” in May. By entering all this information Bloomberg aims to help Clean Ocean Action analyze the full data set to reveal trends affecting marine pollution that they can use for research, public education and citizen action to protect our ocean. This standardization of data will provide Clean Ocean Action and other Bloomberg environmental non-profit partners who can replicate this tested system, the tools they need to manage data and ease of creating data visualizations that will assist in raising awareness and providing insights for advocacy strategies and legislative solutions.

@BloombergDotOrg @business talking about their work with us! #DebrisFreeSea pic.twitter.com/j1LipHpKjg

— Clean Ocean Action (@CleanOcean) November 11, 2015