The shipping industry and environmental scientists might not seem like natural bedfellows, but some are now working together to monitor plastic levels in the oceans.
For example, the Ocean Cleanup NGO has joined forces with global shipping firms for a new project aimed at tracking plastic waste at sea.
The Automated Debris Imaging System (ADIS) project uses AI-powered cameras attached to ships to identify floating plastic and record its location as vessels follow their normal routes across major ocean basins.
The Ocean Cleanup’s ADIS lead, Robin de Vries said the project has evolved from just attaching GoPro cameras to a ship’s railing to using a bespoke plug-and-play ADIS 2 system, which has been developed in conjunction with industry partners, in an interview.
De Vries added the cameras provide a continuously updated global map of ocean plastic hotspots to help target interventions and understand whether anti-pollution measures are actually working.
The system pre-processes its raw images itself at roughly one frame per second, selecting and storing only items of interest.
It then stores the compressed, selected objects for the duration of multiple ocean crossings and during the post-processing, individual plastic sightings are aggregated into segments and later into zonal cells.
He said there are currently 22 ships equipped with these cameras, and they hope to double that number by next year.
De Vries the cameras are designed to focus on larger plastic objects floating on the sea surface over a long period of time.
“We imagine there will be many years, potentially decades of monitoring, which will allow us to observe plastic concentration trends, the state of the ocean and plastic pollution levels,” he told me.
De Vries added several of the firms they have partnered with use popular shipping routes between North America and East Asia, but others operate across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.
“The important thing about this project is we’ve been able to measure plastic concentrations in very remote parts of the ocean, which is data that has been sparse for some time, relying on human visual observation or physical sampling” he added.
“And this information gives us fresh understandings of the nature of plastic hotspots, including the size of them and the space between them.
“We tend to think of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as a uniform place, where all the plastic is gathered, but really it’s a mixture of patches and empty spots.”
De Vries added if other shipping industry operators are interested in joining the scheme, they should contact the Ocean Cleanup.
Yonguk Choi, manager of the shipping property management team at Hyundai Glovis, said
the shipping industry has an unmatched presence across the world’s oceans, in a statement.
Choi added every day, Hyundai Glovis’ vessels travel routes, which connect economies and communities across the globe.
“By deploying ADIS technology on commercial vessels, our fleet is being transformed into global monitoring network, generating the data needed to better understand ocean plastic pollution and accelerate practical solutions for cleaner oceans,” added Choi.
“Commercial shipping has a huge opportunity to do more than move goods. It can help move science, innovation and environmental progress further.”
Other examples include a joint agreement signed in 2021 between Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha (K Line) and the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology to start research on marine plastics.
This joint research used K Line’s vessels to collect samples of plastic particles and evaluate how much plastic waste could be collected from seawater.