Trackplast project sets its efforts in the determination of streams of plastic waste from land sources until they reach the shore and before entering the marine environment. Its ultimate objective is to propose solutions and a roadmap including preventive measures for avoiding or diverging plastic waste from the sea, thus reducing marine littering. For this reason, Trackplast designs and develops an integrated methodology of plastic marine littering management through the use of a customized object identification, tracking and data capturing technology. The developed plastic waste tracking system will be supported by an advanced web platform, which will be responsible for data collection, processing, visualization and reporting to the project’s stakeholders.

Trackplast aims to mapping the currently unknown travel paths of plastic water bottles from the point of production to its final disposal, in islands that are highly depending on the single-use plastic bottled water, attempting to close the loop of the plastic debris supply chain, while measuring and monitoring the plastic waste flows from inland and their contribution to marine littering, through pervasive technologies.  In doing so, 10.000 plastic water bottles are planned to be tagged with a global positioning (LoraWan-type) micro-tag, in order to be constantly tracked over their life cycle in order to estimate the proportion of the bottles actually recycled, the number of bottles disposed or enter the marine ecosystem and finally identify potential patterns in plastic debris pathways leading to their final batch disposal in specific sea regions