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As the electronic tags released in the Ganges River show, plastic pollution can travel thousands of kilometers in a matter of months.
GPS and satellite tags were added to plastic bottles and released in the Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. The maximum tracked distance was 2,845 km (1,768 miles) in 94 days.
The study, led by scientists from the University of Exeter and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), was part of the National Geographic Society’s “Sea to Source: Ganges” expedition.
Our “message in a bottle” tags show how far and how fast plastic pollution can travel. It proves that this is a truly global problem, as a piece of plastic dropped into a river or ocean could soon end up on the other side of the world.
Dr Emily Duncan, lead author of the study, Center for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter
In the Ganges, the bottles usually moved in stages, sometimes getting stuck along the downstream path. Conversely, at sea the bottles covered much greater distances, initially following coastal currents but dispersing further more extensively.
In total, 25 bottles of 500 mL volume were used for the study, with the shape, size and buoyancy chosen to simulate the movement of any plastic bottle.
The hardware inside each plastic bottle is completely open source, ensuring that researchers can replicate, modify, or improve the solution we have presented for tracking other plastic or environmental waste.
Alasdair Davies, Conservation Technology Organization Arribada and Zoological Society of London
“Embedding the electronics inside plastic bottles also represented a unique opportunity to use both cellular and satellite transmitters, ensuring we could track the movement of each bottle through urban waterways where mobile phone networks were available, switching to satellite connectivity once the bottles have reached the open ocean“Added Davies.
Scientists believe bottle labels could be a “powerful tool” for educating, raising awareness and promoting behavior change.
This could be used to teach about plastic pollution in schools, with children being able to see where their bottle goes. The data from these tags could fuel global models to give us a clearer picture of how plastic moves across the ocean and where it ends up..
Dr Emily Duncan, lead author of the study, Center for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter
The team included researchers from the universities of Plymouth (UK), Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Georgia (USA), as well as technology consultancy Icoteq Ltd.
Journal reference
Duncan, EM, et al. (2020) Message in a bottle: open source technology to track the movement of plastic pollution. PLOS ONE. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0242459.
Source: https://www.exeter.ac.uk/
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