Global climate change has been a concern worldwide for years. Discover how iPhone technology and GIS technology contributed to the cleanup of huge plastic islands in our oceans. Bitcoin has been a major component to the success of clean up projects around the world.
Everything makes its way to the sea, and none more so than plastics. There are now five floating plastic islands in different oceans across the world, with the largest island even having a name, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is three times the size of France. Lying between California and Hawaii, it is the world’s biggest ocean waste repository, with 1.8 billion pieces of floating plastic that kill thousands of marine animals each year.
Of course, we now know that 35% of waste originates from wealthy countries and 50% of this waste is exported to developing countries. At the same time, 70% of developing countries mismanage their own waste and lack the infrastructure to collect and recycle waste. Finally, 90% of all plastic waste enters the oceans through rivers, mostly through a few hundred rivers in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Many projects have sprung up looking to tackle the problem of plastic pollution at the end of its journey. On Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador, one of the projects funded by Bitcoin philanthropists is the collection of plastics in the river before they reach the sea.
Plastiks.io is another project that addresses the end games, identifying credible recycling and cleanup projects typically in developing countries that are funded by business or philanthropic individuals in the west.
Canada-based Plastic Bank also works to incentivize stewards to collect plastic from the oceans and, to date, claims that its Ocean Stewards have stopped more than 64 million kilograms of plastic from entering the ocean.
In 2014 in Malaysia, students from Nottingham University, then led by a co-founder of DeFi app Alluo, Remi Tuyaerts, were involved in a number of social enterprise businesses, including one that uses black soldier flies to eat waste and another that converts plastic into beanbags employing the homeless. These businesses are still thriving.
In 2019, Manila Bay Beach in the Philippines was filled with so much plastic waste it earned the nickname “rubbish beach.” Then, within a couple of months, it was reclaimed in a major cleanup. Initially, 5,000 volunteers removed over 45 tons of garbage. Prior to the onslaught in 2018, Bounties Network paid fishermen to collect trash and rewarded them with tokens, and the continued payments helped fund fishermen’s precarious livelihoods and keep the beach clean.
Mark Beylin, then CEO of Bounties Network, documents the impact of the cleanup on the local supporters:
“One of the most interesting dynamics we saw throughout the weekend was the manner in which people shifted from being extrinsically motivated to intrinsically. Many who attended the event came out simply because they saw the opportunity to earn supplemental income. However, as we engaged with participants on an individual basis, we learned about the sense of personal accomplishment they felt in collectively improving their environment.”
However, these projects are all trying to tackle the consequences of littering and its impact on developing countries. What about the projects tackling the issues closer to the source?
A revolution in geography
In 2008, Seán Lynch, founder of OpenLitterMap and LitterCoin in Cork, Ireland, discovered GIS, the mapping software for real-world data such as what governments use to map roads or pipelines and — as a gamer — saw that it was very similar to many of the maps in his games. He then wondered whether he could use this tool to map real-world data into a game. The next question was the use.
“Where I lived in Cork, I had to pass a litter blackspot on my way to college. This was in 2008, and I wondered if I could use GIS to plot this illegal dump onto a map and start a conversation locally. I knew that while litter generally is a global problem, if you could identify local issues, then you might generate interest and, from that, generate action.”
This was in 2012, and Lynch was puzzling away about how to capture the data when the perfect tool in smartphones arrived.
“I was traveling and working as a scuba diver in Thailand, which I adored. I had a really close personal connection with the ocean. Other divers and backpackers like myself picked up a lot of litter from the beaches every day. But it was only with the advent of social media that we realized how badly the planet was polluted,” he says
“One day, I remember seeing someone with an iPhone on the beach, and they were using it to track their location, and this was my next ‘aha’ moment: Why not use this increasingly common mobile device to take photographs and document the litter?”
Inspired by this revelation, Lynch returned to his native Cork to study for a master’s in GIS to fully understand how to use technology to solve the pollution problem. He also realized that the mere presentation of the problem, however huge, would not be a sufficient motivator — it had to be more immediate.
Lynch evolved his thinking into a citizen science platform where data can be crowdsourced on a hyper-local basis:
“People are being asked to make changes to help mitigate climate change, but I can’t pull a CO2 molecule from the air and show it to you. People hear about the environment as some far-away place being polluted, and although it’s true, this approach is disconnected from most people’s day-to-day reality. But if I can help people discover litter on a more local level, like when people zoomed into their home on Google Maps for the first time, I have your attention.”
The timing in terms of the evolution of geography is also on Lynch’s side. He explains that the study of the planet has gone through several iterations and paradigm shifts. Up until the 1960s, the study of geography, and the practice of teaching it, is largely a descriptive process. Then, a computational revolution occurred where universities started getting access to computers and governments started putting satellites into space.
“Suddenly we were able to take this quantitative information about the planet and store it on a computer. The geographers of the world realized they could not only describe how landforms looked but they could actually count things such as the amount of rainfall or how green the grass is. It’s referred to as the quantitative revolution in the study of geography.”
