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During the project activities, the authors proposed a conceptual framework, which utilizes resources available in situ through the chemical and physical processes associated with agriculture; the soil and CO2 (if present) are transformed into fibrous plant matter, harvested and finally converted into mechanical and structural components.

The overall goal of the TRACE project was to build a remote sensing based fully automated system for the detection and tracking of large marine litter and accumulation patches of smaller litter items in order to obtain precise and reliable data on floating macro-litter regarding their quantity, position, accumulation zones, material properties, floating depth, and sources. The tracking mechanism has been implemented by coupling the daily satellite-based detections with an oceanographic forecasting system and by a two-step object matching approach.

Monitoring areas closer to plastic marine litter sources that can be very well targeted, such as rivers and estuarine systems, has the potential to improve mitigation strategies, since they can be spatially focused and even clean-up activities can be more efficient. Recent studies showed that floating plastics emitted from the coast depict a much greater chance to rapidly return to land with most litter stranding within a short distance of the river mouth.

Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs) are crucial elements in many sensor readout systems, such as time-of-flight sensors, laser ranging devices, LiDAR, ultrasonic sensors, particle detectors, etc. To the best of our knowledge, there is currently no rad-hard TDC component available on the market, which could meet the targeted specification defined in this project. The goal of this project is prototyping and lab testing of a radiation-hardened single-chip picosecond TDC in a commercial 65 nm CMOS technology.