By Natalia Lima / Source: Ecorazzi

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A group of scientists is taking the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans by land, sea and air.

While Marco Simeoni, the president of the Race for Water Foundation and his team spend 300 days in a yacht collecting samples of all the plastic pollution found in the ocean, a drone is flying over uninhabited beaches collecting images of converging garbage on its shores.

“This kind of pollution is probably one of our biggest environmental challenges,” explained Simeoni of the project. “We’re talking about water, about fish and birds, about some of the most precious resources we have – and the long-term damage we inflict upon them. There’s an urgent need to act – it’s a race against time.”

The team is then wasting no time with its multi-pronged approach. The swiss team aboard the yacht started their research that will eventually visit all five major garbage vortexes located in three different oceans a month ago. The Swiss scientists stop in these places where plastic pollution accumulates and get samples of it that are then sent for analysis at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne.

Concurrently, a crew flies drones that are mapping where other big trash accumulations are in the world.

“There are special lenses that you can put on the drone’s camera, and you will get images that will show the plastics very well, separate from the background,” said Ari Friedlaender of the Marine Mammal Institute of Oregon State University. “Any data we can get from there will be informative. The first thing to do will be to count and quantify the debris. We will be able to tell what it is, and how much there is. And this information, in turn, might give us some indication of where it’s coming from. And then, once you know what you’ve got to deal with, you can come up with ways to mitigate and remove it and start cleaning up.”

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