Cleaning Up Pristine Beaches Means Spotting Plastic Trash From Space
Satellite detections are being tested to help tackle the millions of tons of waste that enter marine and coastal ecosystems.
Scraps of plastic placed on a beach near Shallow Inlet, in Victoria, Australia during a test of satellite observations.
Source: RMIT University
Plastics are ubiquitous in natural systems, and tiny pieces of the material have been found everywhere from the Arctic to the Mariana Trench. To test a theory that satellites could help detect the waste on beaches, Jenna Guffogg hauled discarded scraps from a clam-shell child’s pool, bubble wrap, single-use PET bottles and a blue polyester tarp to her local seashore in Australia.
The data scientist laid out weathered fragments in fourteen rectangles each covering about 2.25-square-meters (24-square-feet). Within a couple of hours, Maxar Technologies Inc.’s WorldView-3 satellite flew nearly 620 kilometers (385 miles) overhead and snapped a picture. Within a week, she got data and a few months later, she had an answer: the trash can be spotted from space.