Blockchain and the World’s Growing Plastic Problem – Cointelegraph Magazine

Everything makes its way to the sea, and none more so than plastic. There are now five floating plastic islands in various oceans around the world, and the largest island even has a name, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is three times the size of France. Located between California and Hawaii, it is the world’s largest repository of marine debris, with 1.8 billion pieces of floating plastic killing thousands of marine animals each year.

Of course, we now know that 35% of waste comes from rich countries and 50% of this waste is exported to developing countries. At the same time, 70% of developing countries mismanage their own waste and lack the infrastructure to collect and recycle waste. Finally, 90% of all plastic waste ends up in the oceans through rivers, mostly through a few hundred rivers in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Many projects have emerged to tackle the problem of end-of-journey plastic pollution. At Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador, one of the projects funded by Bitcoin philanthropists is collecting plastic in the river before it reaches the ocean.

Plastiks.io is another project that addresses the end games, identifying credible recycling and cleanup projects typically in developing countries that are funded by business or philanthropic individuals in the West.

The Canada-based Plastic Bank also works to encourage stewards to collect plastic from the ocean and claims to date that its Ocean Stewards have stopped more than 64 million kilograms of plastic from entering the ocean.

In 2014 in Malaysia, Nottingham University students, then led by a co-founder of DeFi app Alluo, Remi Tuyaerts, were involved in a number of social enterprises, including one using black soldier flies to eat waste and another converting plastic into beanbags that employs the homeless. These businesses are still thriving.

In 2019, Manila Bay Beach in the Philippines was filled with so much plastic waste that it was nicknamed “garbage beach”. Then, within a couple of months, it was reclaimed in a major cleanup. Initially, 5,000 volunteers removed over 45 tonnes of rubbish. Before the 2018 attack, the Bounties Network paid fishermen to collect trash and rewarded them with tokens, and the continued payments helped fund fishermen’s precarious livelihoods and keep the beach clean.

“Bounties Network partnered with a local digital payment provider, Coins.ph, to ensure people could exchange Ethereum for fiat,” says Simona Pop, co-founder of Bounties Network.

Mark Beylin, then CEO of the Bounties Network, documents the impact of the cleanup on the local supporters:

“One of the most interesting dynamics we saw over the weekend was the way people went from being extrinsically motivated to being intrinsically motivated. Many who attended the event came out simply because they saw the opportunity to earn additional income. But as we engaged participants on an individual basis, we learned about the sense of personal achievement they felt from collectively improving their environment.”

However, these projects all try to tackle the consequences of littering and its impact on developing countries. What about the projects that tackle the problems closer to the source?

A revolution in geography

In 2008, Seán Lynch, founder of OpenLitterMap and LitterCoin in Cork, Ireland, discovered GIS, the mapping software for real-world data, such as what governments use to map roads or pipelines, and – as a player – saw that it was very similar to many of the cards in his games. He then wondered if he could use this tool to map real-world data into a game. The next question was the usage.

“Living in Cork, I had to pass a black spot 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 although litter is generally a global problem, if you could identify local problems, then you could create interest and from that generate action.”

This was in 2012 and Lynch was wondering how to capture the data when the perfect smartphone tool arrived.

“I traveled and worked as a diver in Thailand, which I loved. I had a very close personal connection with the sea. Other divers and backpackers like me picked up a lot of trash from the beaches every day. But it was only with the use of social media that we realized how much 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 pictures and document the rubbish?”

Inspired by this revelation, Lynch returned to his native Cork to study for a master’s degree in GIS to fully understand how to use technology to solve the pollution problem. He also realized that the mere presentation of the problem, no matter how big, would not be a sufficient motivator – it had to be more immediate.

Lynch developed his thinking into a citizen science platform where data can be crowdsourced on a hyperlocal basis:

“People are being asked to make changes to help mitigate climate change, but I can’t pull a CO2 molecule out of the air and show it to you. People hear about the environment as a distant place that is polluted, and while that is true, this approach is disconnected from most people’s everyday reality. But if I can help people spot trash on a more local level, like when people zoomed in on their home on Google Maps for the first time, I have your attention.”

The timing in terms of the development of geography is also on Lynch’s side. He explains that the study of the planet has gone through several iterations and paradigm shifts. Until the 1960s, the study of geography, and the practice of teaching it, was largely a descriptive process. Then a computing revolution occurred where universities began to gain access to computers and governments began to put satellites into space.

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

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This revolution, combined with roughly 4 billion people owning a powerful data-gathering instrument — their smartphone — is giving birth to citizen science. It is no longer just a few experts who count and collect geographic data, but thousands of possible data aggregation points.

Now it’s just a matter of making the data count and figuring out which data is relevant.

In 2014, Lynch began following Bitcoin and particularly liked the concept of proof-of-work, where miners are rewarded for securing the network. When Ethereum launched a few years later, Lynch saw that he can create his own token, which gave him another “aha” moment.

“I had toyed with the idea of ​​using wristbands to reward people, but while it was 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 received his first funding from Project Catalyst from Cardano.

“Remember, Littercoin is not like other cryptos. It will not be listed on any exchange and you will not be able to buy it – it can only be earned by downloading the OpenLitterMap app and starting to record your litter.”

Lynch argues that there is a low barrier to earning the token and notes that it will only be usable in pre-approved stores, and these stores will be in the zero-waste warehouses of the climate economy.

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

Since the launch of the app in April 2017, there have been 6,500 users, with new people coming on board daily. This growing community has been responsible for 500,000 tags and more than 350,000 photographs.

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

“We provide the tools to create knowledge, and that’s a very empowering thing to do.”

To make the process fun, Lynch has created a global #LitterWorldCup with the countries all competing to be the top. Ireland was No. 1, but the Dutch community has since overtaken them. Maybe the garbage collection starts at home after all.

Jillian Godsil

Jillian Godsil is an award-winning journalist, broadcaster and author. She changed the electoral laws of Ireland with a constitutional challenge in the Irish High Court in 2014, she is a former candidate for the European Parliament, and is an advocate for diversity, women in blockchain and the homeless.