Towards a Modelling and Optimisation of the Recovery of Marine Floating Plastic

The recovery of marine plastic litter has been recently recognised as one of the world greatest environmental challenge. While many recent initiatives are oriented towards the recovery of micro plastics, there is still a need for the development of observation and in situ capabilities that will provide appropriate positional data to combat such critical pollution phenomenon. The experimental research developed in this paper introduces a methodology for geo-locating and collecting plastic wastes in a maritime environment. The approach is spatially and temporally-based in the sense plastic wastes are tracked over time according to some meteorological conditions (i.e., winds, currents, tides). Overall, predicting plastic waste displacements constitutes a first step to an optimization process whose objective is to collect plastic debris in littoral zones using a dedicated ship.