The Maelstrom project began in 2020. It’s a Smart technology for Marine Litter Sustainable Removal and Management project that aims to develop technology specifically designed to put a stop to the problem of marine litter.
Involving partners from several European countries, the project aims at monitoring plastic and microplastic waste in open sea, on beaches and on the seabed.
As a technological partner, Infordata has developed a cloud-based backend and a smartphone app that enables the monitoring and cleaning of such marine waste. The system interfaces with European databases (Emodnet) to share data with the scientific community.
The app enables operators and volunteers to perform monitoring and cleaning activities, the smartphone camera facilitates waste identification, and GPS allows for its location to be identified. The collected data is sent to the cloud-based backend and displayed on interactive maps that allow for a detailed view of where waste is mostly collected and what type it is.
Finally, repeated monitoring over time offers a “time-lapse” function on maps to see how waste evolves over time, while KPIs allow monitoring of objectives.
However, the benefits that the project can bring to the environment do not end here. Once the waste is recovered, it is sorted and recycled or transformed into other products to become a new reusable resource in the spirit of a true circular economy.
On June 29th, 2022, the project was presented at the European Conference on Oceans in Lisbon.
The MAELSTROM project, funded by the European H2020 program, has developed an app and a portal for operators in the marine waste sector. The goal is to facilitate transparent collection and recycling processes, recording data in three modules: monitoring, cleaning/clean up, and traceability.
The collected data can be shared with other portals and data archives on marine waste, such as EMODnet – the European network for observation and data on the marine environment.
An important event for INFORDATA SISTEMI took place in Lisbon, where from June 27th to July 1st, the UN Conference: The Ocean Conference is being held to discuss the future
