Use Case: Monitoring the Genovese coastline
Eyes on Plastic collaborates with ENEL and the Municipality of Genova, Italy. The task is to map and monitor the aquatic environments along the Genovese coastline and ports. Besides plastic litter detection this includes sea state and water quality parameters.
In the case of the Municipality of Genoa, Eyes on Plastic can monitor and thus help optimise communal actions to keep beaches, ports, and rivers clean. There are dedicated cleaning actions along beaches and the port areas that have seasonal peaks aligned with the tourism season. One peak will certainly be in summer 2023, when the famous Ocean Race arrives. The city does not have a plastic problem at the scale of Indonesia, but being a tourism destination raises the requirement for clean waters and beaches.
Action
As of March 2022, EOMAP has been monitoring the water quality in the Genoa harbour (using Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 satellites), which will be continued in the frame of the upcoming ESA demonstration project. Parameters monitored will cover turbidity (TUR), Total Suspended Matter (TSM) and real colour satellite images (RGB). In addition, the community is granting the Eyes-on-Plastic team access to webcam data in riverbeds around the city. These cameras are routinely checked for floating macro and mega sized plastic particles.
Benefits
Both, the CCTV and water quality monitoring are part of the WebApp’s dataset. They CCTV records are also used to iteratively improve the AI for more targeted plastic detection. On top of that the WebApp enables the Municipality officers to report plastic occurrence with on-site, simply using their mobile devise. This supports them to target following cleaning activities and – over time – track changes in plastic occurrence to measure impact.
About Genoa
In January 2022, the Municipality of Genoa, Enel and ESA have agreed to cooperate on learning space applications. The signatories’ common goals are accelerating green innovation, targeting circular and blue economies and supporting city transformation. As their first project, the three partners focus on new solutions for a plastic-free society.
Supporters
ENEL is among the largest energy companies in the world by revenue and has an increasing focus on renewable energy and sustainability. Therefore, ENEL collaborates with the commune of Genova to make the port area ready to welcome the Ocean Race in summer 2023.
