Urban Ocean
Marine Litter Assessment
5/7/2024
Shreya
Trevor
Stephanie
Tianxiao
Xiaofan
Team
PM + App
Github + Report
Model + Report
Model
App
11 million
tons of plastic end up in the ocean annually
60%
of examined fish digested microplastic
Marine plastics by the Numbers
Trash needs to be manually removed to when it enters the ocean
Cities are one of the primary sources of this accumulation
Wind and water carry urban trash to oceans
Urban Litter to Marine Trash
Illegal dumping, lack of sanitation infrastructure, single-use plastic
Project Director: Daniel Padilla Ochoa
Director, International Plastics Program - Ocean Conservancy: Edith Checchini
University. of Georgia: Prof. Jenna Jambeck, Ph.D.
Practicum Professors:
Michael Fichman and Matthew Harris
Project Partners
Zero Waste Pilots
Urban Ocean workflow challenges
Our intervention
Why Us?
A web-based dashboard with litter data metrics, demographic metrics, and a litter accumulation risk site-selection tool serving the 12 urban ocean cities in siting zero-waste pilots.
Use Case
Manually collected dataset- scarce
Mostly plastics related
Understanding the Litter Dataset
Data: unbalanced across cities
Road blocks…such as
Standardized data across cities missing
Needing international data sources (OSM) and Meta
The Data Problem
Non-uniform global datasets
Minimal data samples
Sampling bias of litter
(Open Street Map)
Sample City
Overlay
500m fishnet grid
Litter distribution
>
>
>
Fishnet Grid Methodology
Target Variables
Retail Zoning
Water
Restaurant
Feature Engineering: Count
Retail Zoning
Water
Restaurant
K Nearest Neighbor
Model Methodology
Model 1
(Linear Regression)
Model 2
(Random Forest)
Landing on the best Model
Final Model
(Mixed 60-40)
Predicted Values vs Actual Values
Histogram of Residuals
Model Results
5
3
1
Risk Factor on the ground
Source: Shreya Bansal
Source: Google Street view
Source: Google Street view
Connection to Use Case
Let’s dive into the marine litter assessment dashboard
References