Zer0T: Towards Zero Ocean Trash

We want to enable collaborative ocean garbage collection leveraging the resources and technology available today.

Plastic waste is being leaked into the ocean at an alarming rate as you are reading this! We need to take action now!

But what resources are available to us today? Extensive data, like NASA's open database, and... many ships! (estimated above 55k vessels worldwide!)

We propose a "ship-pooling" service where vessel operators and companies can:

• List themselves as garbage collection operators
• Introduce their navigation plan, and receive feedback on the location of debris in their path, using NASA's data.

In order to locate debris in the ships' path, we would develop a system to geo-locate garbage patches using a combination of state of the art methodologies:

• High resolution imaging, for floating and slightly submerged debris.
• Spectro-radiometric sensors, for submerged debris. Since plastics forming the debri patches have characterisitc spectral signatures.

However, this task is not simple. Dedicated satellite missions are very expensive and none of the currently orbiting instruments were specifically designed to detect plastic marine litter. This effort will require combining available NASA datasets of high resolution images, spectro-radiometric data and the future contributions of satellites like PRISMA (Italian satellite carrying an hyperspectral instrument lauched in 2019) or the PACE (NASA - expected launch 2022).

Thinking in the survival of the iniciative, there are several mechanisms we could use to incentivice the adoption of this service among profit-driven transportation companies, such as:

• Public leaderboard, to signal environmental care
• Charity funds, like buying symbolic empty containers on cargo ships, to carry the equivalent weight in collected ocean garbage.

You can find our slides here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/10it52T43vB...

We also created a very simple pilot user interface: https://www.figma.com/proto/YE1fNixUViyA9sIeLQovuk/Zer0T?node-id=0%3A2&scaling=scale-down

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0034425717305722 Article about Spectro-radiometric sensors