Understand plastic pollution with a demo currently running on EDITO
Developing cutting-edge tools for visualising ocean data, exploring different marine scenarios, and making science-based decisions. These digital tools have real-world impact because they transform ocean knowledge into action. In these ways, EDITO will help ensure maximum impact across key objectives of the EU Mission and Waters: protect biodiversity, stop marine pollution, and support the blue economy.
Understand plastic pollution with a demo currently running on
EDITO
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EDITO is developing cutting-edge tools for visualising ocean data, exploring different marine scenarios, and making science-based decisions. These digital tools have real-world impact because they transform ocean knowledge into action. In these ways, EDITO will help ensure maximum impact across key objectives of the EU Mission and Waters:
protect biodiversity
stop marine pollution
support the blue economy
Let’s dive into an app now running as a demo on EDITO that can help us understand and simulate the patterns of plastic pollution.
Plastic pollution severely threatens marine environments and coastal communities. To better understand and address this threat, we need more precise tools to track it.
EDITO currently offers a demo of a Marine Plastic Tracker, developed by SnapPlanet. It displays the results of models that simulate plastic drifting through rivers, oceans and coastal areas over three years. These simulations take the combined effects of currents, waves and wind on plastic drifting through the ocean. Although the app cannot be seen as simulating reality, and the information it currently displays is for demonstration purposes only, it does show the potential of the European Digital Twin Ocean in terms of offering practical tools to address societal challenges.
In this hypothetical example, we select the Po River Estuary as a starting point. From there, we can track the likely destination of all the plastic that enters the Mediterranean Sea from the Po’s flow.
Looking closer, note how the plastic debris are shown in this simulation to have spread from the Po Estuary, across the Eastern Mediterranean and all the way to the North African coast in just 3 year.
Inversely, by selecting an ending point in the middle of the Atlantic, we can ask the tracker to display the origin of plastic debris that are ending up in the selected location after approximately 3 years of drifting.
Here, due to global ocean circulation patterns, we can see that plastic debris ending up in this area known as the North Atlantic Gyre (a well-known hotspot for plastic pollution) hypothetically originates mostly from the Eastern American coasts and the Caribbean Sea, most likely transported by the Gulf Stream before it gets trapped in the Gyre.
Finally, this tracker lets you launch scenarios to explore how many tons of plastic could not end up in the ocean, were we to reduce coastal or riverine plastic emissions. As such, in our hypothetical example, the model suggests that, if North American coastal plastic emissions were to be reduced by 50%, after 3 years, we would see a decreased plastic concentration of about 3700 tonnes less than what would have been there otherwise.
In the future, these technologies can help improve marine plastic monitoring and inform mitigation and prevention strategies.
In future, with the help of EDITO’s Marine Plastic Tracker, users will be able to access more precise, sophisticated models of plastic pollution based on factual data and take steps to reduce plastic pollution in line with the EU Zero Pollution Action Plan.
With these tools and more, EDITO can offer solutions for combatting plastic pollution, backed by data to facilitate real-world actions.
Some material in this article previously appeared on EDITO Model-Lab. As part of EDITO Phase One (2023-2025), the EDITO-Model Lab project developed the next generation of ocean models and integrated them onto the EDITO platform. You can read the original version here, describing EDITO Model-Lab’s delivery of two demonstrators that simulate where marine pollution is transported and how it spreads by making use of ocean circulation data. Thanks to EDITO Model-Lab.
