Blockchain and the world’s growing plastic problem – Cointelegraph Magazine

Blockchain and the world’s growing plastic problem – Cointelegraph Magazine


Everything makes its method to the sea, and none extra so than plastics. There are actually 5 floating plastic islands in numerous oceans throughout the world, with the largest island even having a reputation, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is thrice the measurement of France. Lying between California and Hawaii, it’s the world’s greatest ocean waste repository, with 1.8 billion items of floating plastic that kill 1000’s of marine animals annually.

Of course, we now know that 35% of waste originates from rich international locations and 50% of this waste is exported to creating international locations. At the identical time, 70% of creating international locations mismanage their very own waste and lack the infrastructure to gather and recycle waste. Finally, 90% of all plastic waste enters the oceans by rivers, principally by a couple of hundred rivers in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Many initiatives have sprung up trying to deal with the problem of plastic air pollution at the finish of its journey. On Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador, one in all the initiatives funded by Bitcoin philanthropists is the assortment of plastics in the river earlier than they attain the sea. 

Plastiks.io is one other mission that addresses the finish video games, figuring out credible recycling and cleanup initiatives usually in creating international locations which are funded by enterprise or philanthropic people in the west.

Canada-based Plastic Bank additionally works to incentivize stewards to gather plastic from the oceans and, so far, claims that its Ocean Stewards have stopped greater than 64 million kilograms of plastic from getting into the ocean.

In 2014 in Malaysia, college students from Nottingham University, then led by a co-founder of DeFi app Alluo, Remi Tuyaerts, had been concerned in a lot of social enterprise companies, together with one which makes use of black soldier flies to eat waste and one other that converts plastic into beanbags using the homeless. These companies are nonetheless thriving.

In 2019, Manila Bay Beach in the Philippines was full of a lot plastic waste it earned the nickname “rubbish beach.” Then, inside a few months, it was reclaimed in a significant cleanup. Initially, 5,000 volunteers eliminated over 45 tons of rubbish. Prior to the onslaught in 2018, Bounties Network paid fishermen to gather trash and rewarded them with tokens, and the continued funds helped fund fishermen’s precarious livelihoods and maintain the seashore clear.

“Bounties Network got a partnership with a local digital payment provider, Coins.ph, to make sure people could exchange the Ethereum into fiat,” says Simona Pop, co-founder of Bounties Network.

Mark Beylin, then CEO of Bounties Network, paperwork the affect of the cleanup on the native supporters:

“One of the most interesting dynamics we saw throughout the weekend was the manner in which people shifted from being extrinsically motivated to intrinsically. Many who attended the event came out simply because they saw the opportunity to earn supplemental income. However, as we engaged with participants on an individual basis, we learned about the sense of personal accomplishment they felt in collectively improving their environment.” 

However, these initiatives are all making an attempt to deal with the penalties of littering and its affect on creating international locations. What about the initiatives tackling the points nearer to the supply? 

A revolution in geography

In 2008, Seán Lynch, founding father of OpenLitterMap and LitterCoin in Cork, Ireland, found GIS, the mapping software program for real-world knowledge equivalent to what governments use to map roads or pipelines and — as a gamer — noticed that it was similar to a lot of the maps in his video games. He then puzzled whether or not he might use this software to map real-world knowledge right into a sport. The subsequent query was the use.

“Where I lived in Cork, I had to pass a litter blackspot on my way to college. This was in 2008, and I wondered if I could use GIS to plot this illegal dump onto a map and start a conversation locally. I knew that while litter generally is a global problem, if you could identify local issues, then you might generate interest and, from that, generate action.”

This was in 2012, and Lynch was puzzling away about easy methods to seize the knowledge when the good software in smartphones arrived.

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“I was traveling and working as a scuba diver in Thailand, which I adored. I had a really close personal connection with the ocean. Other divers and backpackers like myself picked up a lot of litter from the beaches every day. But it was only with the advent of social media that we realized how badly the planet was polluted,” he says

“One day, I remember seeing someone with an iPhone on the beach, and they were using it to track their location, and this was my next ‘aha’ moment: Why not use this increasingly common mobile device to take photographs and document the litter?”

Inspired by this revelation, Lynch returned to his native Cork to check for a grasp’s in GIS to totally perceive easy methods to use expertise to unravel the air pollution problem. He additionally realized that the mere presentation of the problem, nevertheless enormous, wouldn’t be a adequate motivator — it needed to be extra fast.

Lynch developed his considering right into a citizen science platform the place knowledge could be crowdsourced on a hyper-local foundation:

“People are being asked to make changes to help mitigate climate change, but I can’t pull a CO2 molecule from the air and show it to you. People hear about the environment as some far-away place being polluted, and although it’s true, this approach is disconnected from most people’s day-to-day reality. But if I can help people discover litter on a more local level, like when people zoomed into their home on Google Maps for the first time, I have your attention.”

The timing by way of the evolution of geography can also be on Lynch’s facet. He explains that the examine of the planet has gone by a number of iterations and paradigm shifts. Up till the Nineteen Sixties, the examine of geography, and the follow of instructing it, is basically a descriptive course of. Then, a computational revolution occurred the place universities began having access to computer systems and governments began placing satellites into house.

“Suddenly we were able to take this quantitative information about the planet and store it on a computer. The geographers of the world realized they could not only describe how landforms looked but they could actually count things such as the amount of rainfall or how green the grass is. It’s referred to as the quantitative revolution in the study of geography.”

This revolution, mixed with roughly 4 billion folks proudly owning a robust knowledge assortment instrument — their smartphone — offers start to citizen science. It is not only a few specialists counting and amassing geographical knowledge however 1000’s of attainable knowledge aggregation factors.

Now it’s only a case of creating the knowledge depend and discovering out what knowledge is related.

In 2014, Lynch began following Bitcoin and significantly favored the idea of proof-of-work, the place miners are rewarded for securing the community. When Ethereum launched a couple of years later, Lynch noticed that he can create his personal token, which gave him one other “aha” second.

“I had been toying with the idea of using bracelets to reward people, but while an attractive idea, it wasn’t practical, so the idea of rewarding people with a token was infinitely more compelling.”

And so, in 2015, Littercoin was born. In 2022, Lynch obtained his first funding from Project Catalyst from Cardano. 

“Mind you, Littercoin is not like other crypto. It won’t be listed on any exchange, and you won’t be able to buy it — it can only be earned by downloading the OpenLitterMap app and starting recording the litter.”

Lynch argues that there’s a low barrier to incomes the token and notes that it’ll solely be spendable at pre-approved shops, and these shops can be in the zero waste shops in the local weather financial system.

“You earn the Littercoin by improving the environment, and you can spend it in stores that also improve the environment — it’s a virtuous circle.”

Since launching the app in April 2017, there have been 6,500 customers, with new folks approaching board day by day. This growing neighborhood has been answerable for 500,000 tags and greater than 350,000 pictures.

“And if you keep the map open, you can see the updates in real-time. So, if someone spots some litter and picks it up anywhere in the world, you can see it update on the map. We are creating a global community working to rid the planet of litter,” Lynch says. 

“We give the tools to create the knowledge, and that is a very empowering thing to do.”

To make the course of enjoyable, Lynch has created a worldwide #LitterWorldCup with the international locations all competing to be the high. Ireland was No. 1, however the Dutch neighborhood has since overtaken them. Maybe litter assortment begins at residence in spite of everything.

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Jillian Godsil

Jillian Godsil is an award successful journalist, broadcaster and writer. She modified electoral legal guidelines in Ireland with a constitutional problem in Ireland’s Supreme Court in 2014, she’s a former European Parliamentary Candidate, and is an advocate for range, girls in blockchain and the homeless.





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