GOLDEN SEAL Project: Tackling Plastic Beach Littering by Utilizing IoT Technologies & UAVs

Plastic marine pollution has emerged as a major concern worldwide, as millions of tons of end up in the
oceans every year, causing environmental, economic, health, and aesthetic issues. Plastics’ durability is
their downfall when it comes to marine littering, as the material can persist in the environment for
hundreds of years, slowly breaking down into smaller fragments known as microplastics.
As a result, their increasing production volume supplied to the global economy is a major cause of marine
pollution. Part of the plastic marine pollution comes from fishing and other maritime
activities or illegal dumping at sea, but about 80% comes from land-based sources, mainly
due to improper waste management practices. As a result, millions of tons of plastic that could become
valuable secondary raw materials, end up polluting the beaches, causing immense and long-term damage.

The GOLDEN SEAL project aspires to mitigate the repercussions of marine pollution, by
providing an engaging and gamified learning experience to the people that visit beaches for recreational
activities. The project develops an integrated technology solution that incorporates
numerous new technologies, in order to form an ecosystem dedicated to the monitoring and eliminating
of the plastic marine pollution. The data collected by the project’s subsystems are used for the
development of a serious game, in which the beaches compete with each other, and the game aspires to
raise awareness and engage citizens and tourists in cleaning and recycling activities, in order to assist beach
operators to keep their areas clean of plastic debris. To that aim, the project’s final product is a platform
that combines the collected data into a gamified application and inspires individuals to shift their
behaviour towards safe disposal of plastic debris and marine environment conservation.