Drones and artificial intelligence help combat the San Francisco Bay’s trash problem paid Oracle
Ever since the industrial chemist Leo Baekeland began synthesizing phenol and formaldehyde in 1907, the world has developed a love-hate relationship with the resulting polymer: plastic. are used only once and then thrown away. Even for those who dutifully recycle our plastic water bottles and sandwich bags, we’re only tackling a small part of the problem.
“Considering the size of the problem, there’s relatively limited infrastructure in place to capture and treat stormwater,” says Tony Hale, program director for environmental informatics at the nonprofitThat’s where SFEI is looking to use research and data—and most recently, drones—to make a difference.
In addition to sending out crews of people on foot to count and collect trash in local waterways, SFEI began using camera-equipped drones to assess that waste on a much larger scale. “Most ground crews working for stormwater programs monitor trash once a year, twice if we’re lucky,” Hale says. “So what we can learn about trash and its impact on communities is limited by the number of people we can afford to send out.”
With drone photography, “we can track all of the trash in a creek, river, or stream, examine how it’s distributed, and then apply machine-learning algorithms to analyze those images as often as we want,” Hale says.
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