Plastic Origins is a project initiated by the not-for-profit Surfrider Foundation Europe in search of solutions to address the source of ocean pollution. Supported by citizens, associations, scientists, and socially responsible companies, the Plastic Origins project aims to map plastic pollution in European rivers by applying participatory science and Artificial Intelligence technology. This mapping data helps to identify areas of high impact, gain a deeper understanding of the problem on the field, and measure the evolution of pollution over time as well as to raise awareness among political decision-makers on the local, national, and European levels and urge them to act. It's a hot topic, here is why:

1. Plastic pollution is the second biggest threat to our Ocean after climate change.
2. Ocean plastic pollution mainly comes from terrestrial sources. Rivers are pathways for litter entering the ocean. For instance, a bottle lost in Paris city might end-up in the Seine River and reach the sea.
3. Investigating river plastic pollution helps to localize plastic inputs and monitor trends, improvements and measures efficiency.
4. There is currently no obligation for European countries to monitor river plastic pollution. The European water framework directive does not include plastic pollution as an indicator for good environmental status.

All you need to know to get involved

Developments and improvements of Surfrider Plastic Origins tech tools are led by a bunch of amazing volunteers. Surfrider Europe on its own does not have within the organisation technical competencies thus we rely on YOU for making this project a success and welcome any help since there are many ways to contribute, even if you’re not a technical person.

Only with a common effort we can refine the technology, improve and duplicate it, which is why the code is open-source on the Surfrider Foundation Europe GitHub page, and collected data is available online and publicly accessible on the Plastic Origins website.

How does it work?

• Volunteers film riverbanks via the Plastic Origins mobile application available on Android & IOS (collection of videos and manually labeled images) or by using GoPro (collection of videos uploaded to the Plastic Origins website).
• Our Data Labeling Platform allows building a labeled image dataset via crowdsourcing (people tag an existing image dataset and/or contribute to this dataset by uploading images) that helps to improve our AI waste detection and tracking prediction.
• AI recognizes and classifies waste on collected videos to give an open source mapping that feeds and collects data in #OpenData.

How we work

We use the following tools for project management and dev:

• Microsoft Teams -> for discussions.
• Azure portal -> for building, testing and deploying.
• GitHub -> for storing codes, codes' descriptions, documentation, and Architectural Decision Record (ADR).

Our development language is English. All comments and documentation should be written in English so we can share our learnings with developers around the world.

Repo organisation

Ready? Get involved!

Please, get in touch with @SabineAllouSurfrider.

Contributors

Thanks everyone !

Thanks also go to people who are not on GitHub but still actively contributing to the project's sucess.

License

We’re using the MIT License. For more details, check LICENSE file.