Pacific Cup to increase scientific understanding of plastic pollution
by Robin Clegg 3 Apr 21:20 BST
AI camera © The Ocean Cleanup
The Ocean Cleanup is putting the call out to competitors taking part in the Pacific Cup to contribute to the advancement of ocean cleanup technology and protecting marine ecosystems by installing innovative AI cameras and taking smart buoys, provided by the global non-profit, on the return leg after the race, between Hawaii and San Francisco.
Participating sailors will be helping to detect plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean and map hotspots for future cleanup efforts.
The Pac Cup, which starts from Monday 6th July, will take competitors through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), the most concentrated area of ocean plastic pollution globally, a plastic soup twice the size of Texas.
Sailors are being asked to install Automated Debris Imaging Systems (ADIS) on their vessels for the return leg. These are compact, GoPro-sized cameras (400g/0.9 pounds) that can be mounted on a mast or vessel railing. The cameras use a machine-learning model to automatically detect and classify marine debris. The unit then sends this data via an internal SIM card back to researchers at The Ocean Cleanup HQ in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
This will help improve predictive models for plastic hotspots as part of The Ocean Cleanup's operations which have so far removed nearly 500,000 kg of plastic from the GPGP.
Bob Hinden, the Commodore of the Pacific Cup Yacht Club, said: "We are pleased to be able to participate in this important project. All of our participants have seen the increasing amount of plastic in the ocean during the race from San Francisco to Kaneohe on Oahu, and on return trips. We think this is a very important project to learn more about the problem and contribute to its solution."
Dr. Peter Puskic, Senior Field Scientist at The Ocean Cleanup, said: "We started a pilot version of this initiative last year with sailors in the Transpac and now with the help of the Pac Cup we aim to scale it up to better target our extraction operations and clean up the patch more effectively and economically. The sailing community can become citizen scientists and boost our efforts to solve this environmental crisis by signing up and being part of the solution."
The organisation has been developing and scaling technologies to rid the world's oceans of plastics and over the past 10 years has conducted extensive monitoring and cleanup operations in this region.
Estimated to contain around 100,000 tons of plastic, the GPGP is mostly comprised of ghost nets and other fishing gear, alongside a wide variety of plastic pieces, with some dating back to the 1960s.
Sailors can sign up here. Those not racing in the Pacific Cup can help The Ocean Cleanup by logging plastic sighting in the citizen science app.