Drones And Artificial Intelligence Help Combat The San Francisco Bay’s Trash Problem Posted on : Nov 21 - 2019

Ever since the industrial chemist Leo Baekeland began synthesizing phenol and formaldehyde in 1907, the world has developed a love-hate relationship with the resulting polymer: plastic.

While plastic is convenient, durable, and cheap, 50% of all plastics (about 150 million tons every year, worldwide) are used only once and then thrown away. Even for those who dutifully recycle our plastic water bottles and sandwich bags, we’re only tackling a small part of the problem. That’s because heavy winds and rain carry huge amounts of plastic waste along city streets and into the stormwater system, where it likely flows directly into creeks, rivers, bays, and eventually the ocean, with no treatment to filter out plastics.

“Considering the size of the problem, there’s relatively limited infrastructure in place to capture and treat stormwater,” says Tony Hale, program director for environmental informatics at the nonprofit San Francisco Estuary Institute (SFEI).

That’s where SFEI is looking to use research and data—and most recently, drones—to make a difference.

In addition to sending out crews of people on foot to count and collect trash in local waterways, SFEI began using camera-equipped drones to assess that waste on a much larger scale.

“Most ground crews working for stormwater programs monitor trash once a year, twice if we’re lucky,” Hale says. “So what we can learn about trash and its impact on communities is limited by the number of people we can afford to send out.”

With drone photography, “we can track all of the trash in a creek, river, or stream, examine how it’s distributed, and then apply machine-learning algorithms to analyze those images as often as we want,” Hale says.

The drone research is part of a new project by SFEI and its sister organization Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, through funding from the Ocean Protection Council, to validate trash-monitoring methods, and produce a trash-monitoring playbook that community cleanup groups, municipal programs, environmental agencies, and ecologists can learn from and put to use. The effort studies initiatives such as plastic bag bans to urban rain gardens.

“Our mission is to help city planners find the best ways to filter their stormwater and stop contaminants such as trash and plastics from entering their protected wetlands and public waterways,” Hale says. View More