WA project gives new view of plastic dump sites in world’s worst ocean polluters

Satellite vision and machine learning have been used to create a new global tool which has mapped thousands of undocumented plastic waste dumps from the 24 worst countries for rubbish winding up in the ocean.

Global Plastic Watch was developed by the West Australian-based Minderoo Foundation to help governments around the world to tackle the leakage of plastic into the sea and has taken regularly updated satellite vision to create a high-resolution map.

The 24 worst countries for plastic pollution and Australia have been included so far in the tool.Credit: Minderoo Foundation

India had the most undocumented sites with 690, followed by China with 415 and Australia’s close neighbour Indonesia with 373.

The foundation also mapped Australia and found 16 sites where it was unable to determine if they were sanctioned dumping grounds.

An estimated 10 million tonnes of plastic waste go into the ocean every year and 90 per cent of it comes from just 24 countries.

Minderoo Ocean Conservation technology and innovation lead Fabien Laurier said about 91 per cent of the oceans plastics was due to leakage from the land.

“If you’re going to be able to manage plastic waste, you need to be able to measure it and it turns out when it comes to data you don’t have a lot of available data,” he said.

“Governments and nations are reporting their waste sites, but there are limitations in terms of what they know and they don’t know what they don’t know.

“So in order to stop it we need to stop plastics entering the ocean in the first place.

“The concept was, let’s map plastics so we can stop it from entering waterways.”

Dr Laurier said one of the most surprising findings from the project was the sheer number of waste sites, with close to 3000 mapped.

“One in every five of those waste sites are within a couple hundred metres of a waterway.

“It’s incredible to see this huge amount of waste, which in the best-case scenario is getting washed away when rivers are flowing and the worse case scenario we can even see heavy machinery pushing plastics into those rivers.”

The proximity to waterways of some sites led the project team to creating a risk index for the likelihood of plastic leakage into the environment from different sites.

The Minderoo Foundation is now working with the Indonesian government to come up with solutions for plastic waste and is in discussions with other nations like Vietnam and Albania.

Fabien Laurier using the new global waste finding tool.Credit: Minderoo Foundation

The foundation and governments will be able to measure their success in real-time as satellite images are updated showing whether or not dump sites have reduced.

Indonesian National Plastic Action Partnership chair Sri Indrastuti Hadiputranto said dealing with the plastic pollution problem was going to take a joint effort from the public and private sector as well as civil society.

“I believe more data-oriented innovations like Global Plastic Watch will lead us to a more sustainable policy outcome and improving collaborations in data collections in Indonesia,” she said.

The Minderoo team expects to have the whole world mapped out for undocumented plastic waste sites later this year.

Work is also underway with Nobel Prize winner and former US vice president Al Gore to better quantify the amount of greenhouse emissions attributable to waste sites.

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