Increasing the visibility of ocean plastic

Date: December 2, 2020, No. Consortium with involvement from the University of Stuttgart develops innovative monitoring technology designed to detect plastic waste at the bottom of the ocean - [Picture: Joost den Haan - planblue] Whether straws, plastic bottles or packaging, tones of plastic waste ends up in the oceans, the vast majority of it on the ocean floor out of the sight of human beings. The precise extent of the contamination, as well as the locations where particularly large deposits of plastic have formed and how it can be recovered is unclear. In the "MtecPla" project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), partners from industry and research, including the University of Stuttgart, are developing the world's first monitoring technology, which is intended to identify and visualize plastic waste on the ocean floor. Only a small proportion of the plastic waste in the world's oceans is swimming on the surface, the rest of it sinks deep into the water or to the ocean floor, where it poses a hazard to plant and animal life. Previously there was no way of recovering plastic on the ocean floor in any large quantities. Traditional methods of monitoring, whereby divers would manually collect image data along lines or stretched cables (so-called transects), could only provide information about very limited geographical areas.