Novel initiative Commenced By teenagers to tackle riverbank pollution
The Habit of throwing waste here and there leads to more significant pollution no matter how insignificant the amount is! Children get the wrong message from all this stuff. Germany and France have taken a very innovative initiative to identify and remove Garbage from rivers.
At first glance, a place in Ruhr, Western Germany, might appear attractive, but a closer look will change your mind.
Kevin, Neal, along their other classmates came to visit the place for Fishing. Instead of Fishing, they collected Garbage from that place in Ruhr as much garbage was surrounding the area, mostly the plastics bottles. There also found few bottles of glasses.
They were doing this as a part of a project titled “Plastic Pirates ” as a high school student.
Teenage students like them working like natural scientists. They were entitled to collect the water sample, measure the size and shape of the founded debris, and record the findings. Scientists of Milltown used all these pieces of information to draw a garbage map also calculate the amount of garbage that will end up in the sea.
Teachers feel happy to inspire future scientists. A teacher named Ramona Petri said, “This thing affects me too. It annoyed me when people left after throwing any waste. At least, we need to be more careful about our actions in front of a teenager/ Childs.
The “Plastic Pirates” projects showed that, on average, a piece of rubbish was found in every two square meters of the riverbanks in Germany.
Another Project named “Plastic Origins ” going on in France to identify such Garbage. Well, the project is more advanced as they incorporated artificial intelligence and app to detect waste.
Explaining the success of such Initiatives, Antonio Bruges of the Surfrider Foundation, said “We want to motivate as many volunteers and citizens as possible to visit the rivers. We want them to collect data by either riding the Kayak boats or walking alongside the riverbank. Their collected information and record video will help identify the garbage sites, and on it, we can create a map showing plastic pollution in the river.”
The project’s main goal, “Plastic Origin”, is to implement strict laws regarding plastic waste and set a maximum amount of plastics found in the rivers across Europe. It is possible to identify the most polluted sites by analyzing the garbage map.
According to Antonio Bruges, “These (Garbage maps) maps are essential as it helps us to set our priorities.
Pollutants come from everywhere, but as we all know, the lion’s share of pollutants found in oceans comes from River dumping. We still do not know which rivers are the main contributors.
The app, however, cannot detect microplastics. Every year in Germany, Per capita, 4kg of micro-plastics entered into the environment.
Tires of vehicles waste from industries and households are the main sources of it. The waste treatment plants are not up to date enough to filter out micro compounds from wastewater. The Young “Plastic Pirates” feel the necessity of more advanced solutions to tackle plastic pollution. Within just two hours, they collected waste that was impossible to carry away from the beautiful place in Ruhr.
