There is growing global concern over the chemical, biological and ecological impact of marine plastic pollution. Every year many millions of tons of plastic enter the global oceans but where it goes remains largely unknown. Remote sensing has the potential to provide long-term, global monitoring but for plastics in the ocean it is still in early stages.

The goal of the project was to generate synthetic data sets of marine debris accumulations and to train on them AI models in view to automatically detect plastic litter accumulations in real EO images.

In order to achieve this goal, the project aimed at the following objectives:

The Project 'Plastic waste and the Black Sea, monitoring litter at sea and on the land from Sentinel-2 data' was funded by the Discovery element of ESA's Basic Activities, and it had the following objectives:

• To facilitate systematic marine debris detection by Earth observation for tracking them before they beach, if ever, by improving a detection algorithm already sketched and tested, and develop a true detector from it
• To test various methodologies for the detection and identification of terrestrial illegal dumping sites